Christine Adams

Biography

Christine Adams has taught at St. Mary’s College since the fall of 1992. She has published primarily in French family and gender history, including two monographs: A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State Press) and Poverty, Charity and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Illinois Press). Most recently, she published The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame DuBarry (Penn State Press) with Tracy Adams. She also writes on current events and has a particular interest in the politics of gender and reproductive rights. She is a 2020-2021 fellow for the American Council of Learned Societies and a spring 2021 Andrew W. Mellon long-term fellow at the Newberry Library where she is working on a book on the cultural and political impact of the Merveilleuses, a group of fashionable young women in late eighteenth-century France. While her courses cover topics in European history from the Middle Ages to the present, she especially enjoys sharing her love of all things French with her students.