David Gilks

David Gilks is a scholar of the long eighteenth century. A historian of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, his interests include the history of political culture, conservation and collecting, art and architecture, and discoveries and knowledge-making. Much of his research explores contestations, showing how certain cultural subjects – such as the destruction of an urban monument, restoration of a Gallo-Roman amphitheatre, commemoration of a deceased hero, or seizure of artworks from the papacy – attracted highly revealing interventions and rebuttals. His research reconstructs these contestations and reveals how episodes of cultural fissure reflected and exacerbated deeper social, political and ideological fractures. 

He is the author of Quatremère de Quincy: Art and Politics during the French Revolution (Oxford University Press) and articles including ‘Attitudes to the displacement of cultural property during the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon’ (The Historical Journal). His second-book project is tentatively called How to become a French revolutionary hero: successful and unsuccessful pantheonizations, 1791-1804. His annotated translation of Quatremère de Quincy’s Letters on the plan to abduct the monuments of Italy (published by the Getty Research Institute) made a foundational text of heritage studies accessible to Anglophone readers. 

Before coming to UEA, David Gilks was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at QMUL. He lives in Norwich with his wife and two sons. 

David Gilks teaches widely in the history of early modern and modern Europe. He currently offers two second-year modules, ‘France from the Enlightenment to the Belle Époque, 1714-1914’ and ‘Anatomy of a city: Paris, 1682-1815’, and two third-year modules, ‘The Enlightenment’ and ‘The French Revolution, 1789-1804’. He lectures on most first-year modules and leads several seminars and the tutorial option ‘English travellers in France, 1688-1815’ for the MA programme.

He is delighted to hear from graduate students interested in the history of political thought and culture, memorialization and pantheonization, art and aesthetics, architecture and urban development, heritage and collecting, and the rediscovery of the past and wider world, besides most aspects French history.

David Gilks has twice been shortlisted in the ‘Most Inspiring Teaching’ category of the Student Union’s Transforming Education Awards. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a UEA Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice.

BA History, University of Cambridge (2002)

Special Student, Harvard University (2002-3)

Pensionnaire Étranger, École Normale Supérieure, Paris (2004-5)

PhD History, University of Cambridge (2008)