Benjamin Bernard

Benjamin S. Bernard is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of History and attached to Yale President McInnis’s faculty Committee on Trust in Higher Education. He currently works on the question of the legitimacy of universities. A historian of early modern Europe with a specialization in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, he studies the histories of education institutions, ideas, and gender/sexuality. His first book project, provisionally titled The Decadence of the College: Sexuality, Erudition, and the Moral Legitimacy of Classical Education Institutions in Early Modern Paris, 1645–1763, traces the rise, fall, and reformation of elite schools as institutions of ethical authority in pre-Revolutionary France. 

 

Bernard’s article “The Sodomy Consultant of Paris,” about the moral politics of education, urbanization, and sexuality under absolutism, is published in the autumn 2025 issue of French Historical Studies. An earlier dissertation chapter version received the “Honorable Mention” distinction from the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History’s Gregory Sprague Prize panel.

 

Dedicated to public outreach and participation, he is the producer of the award-winning four-part documentary Sister Revolutions, a podcast that considers the parallel histories and memory of the Age of Revolutions in Charlottesville, VA and its French sister city, Besançon.

 

Bernard teaches courses in European and Western history from antiquity to the present, the history of education, gender/sexuality, and various interdisciplinary themes (“friendship,” “decadence”). He also has expertise in first-year undergraduate liberal arts education and project-based pedagogy, including historical documentary/podcasting. To date, he has taught 875 undergraduate students at Sciences Po (Reims, France), Princeton, NYU, Fordham, and the University of Virginia in France and the U.S.A.

 

Bernard holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. (with distinction) and Ph.D. from Princeton. In Paris, France, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. From 2022–25, he served as Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia.

 

 

“Civic morality and the problem of the local in the historiography of the American and French Revolutions: The cases of Charlottesville, Virginia and Besançon in Franche-Comté.”  L’Ordinaire des Amériques (special issue forthcoming, winter 2025/26).

 

“The Sodomy Consultant of Paris: Abbé Nicolas Théru and the Policing of Morals at the Collège Mazarin, 1688–1737.” French Historical Studies Vol. 48, no. 3 (2025), pp. 385–416. https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-11781717.

 

“Morality and media in seventeenth-century France: The Collège Mazarin and the Maison royale de Saint-Louis.” In Julia Doe, ed. From Saint-Cyr to Cannons: Moreau and Handel’s Esther. Washington, DC: Opera Lafayette (2024).

 

Dual review of Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789, by Julie Hardwick, and The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic by Karen Hollewand. Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, no. 3 (2023): 473-479. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/885576.

 

Review of Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History, edited by Jeffrey Merrick. Eighteenth-Century Studies 55, no. 1 (2021): 109–13. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2021.0109.

 

 

Bernard, Benjamin S., and Sage Tanguay. “Sister Revolutions.” Symposia (Season 3). 2024. https://www.virginiaaudio.com/podcasts/sister-revolutions-2zfka.

-Winner, “Documentary Community Radio” category, Hometown Media Awards - Community Radio division, Foundation of the Alliance for Community Media (2025).

 

 

“How Edmund White Entered My Life at the Right Time, Several Times,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 12, 2025. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/how-edmund-white-entered-my-life-right-time-several-times.

 

With Matthew McDonald. Review of Nathalie Coilly and Caroline Vrand, eds. Imprimer! L’Europe de Gutenberg, 1450-1520. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2023. EuropeNow (November 20, 2023). 

 

“How Lefebvre de Beauvray Read his Montesquieu,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 10 March 2023. https://jhiblog.org/2023/03/10/how-lefebvre-de-beauvray-read-his-montesquieu/.

 

“What the ‘gender reveal’ reveals,” Public Seminar, 10 September 2020. https://publicseminar.org/essays/what-the-gender-reveal-reveals

 

“The moral trade-off of endowment spending,” Inside Higher Ed, 27 May 2020. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/05/27/should-universities-tap-endowments-response-budget-crises-brought-pandemic-opinion.