Professor Giora Sternberg

My research and publications to date have focused on two broad areas at the intersection among political, social, and cultural history: symbolic interaction and writing practices. My first book, Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV (OUP, 2014; paperback ed. 2016; shortlisted for the Royal History Society Gladstone Prize), investigates how and why individuals and groups expressed, shaped, and contested social positions in a variety of contexts, from high ceremonies to everyday routines. For contemporaries, status interaction operated as a key tool for defining and redefining identities, relations, and power; for scholars, it provides a novel lens for understanding early modern action and agency. My work on correspondence, especially in my Past & Present article from 2009, offers a systematic framework for analysing letters as vehicles of status.

My second monograph, Writing Acts: The Power of Writing in the Ancien Régime (forthcoming in Oxford University Press) investigates the power of manuscript documents – as both texts and material objects – to act in the social and political arenas. The first part explores the ceremonial records that shaped the hierarchies of the Ancien Régime, not only at its centre (see my 2013 article in The Journal of Modern History) but also in its social and geographical periphery. The second part illuminates a largely uncharted form of early modern agency: the protestations that resisted social and political authority on all levels, micro and macro. My article, ‘Writing to Undo: Protestation as a Mode of Early Modern Resistance’, has recently appeared in The American Historical Review.