Allan Potofsky is Professor of Atlantic and French history at the Université Paris-Diderot, specializing in early modern French America and Parisian urban history during the eighteenth century and the French Revolution. He is the author of Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolutions (Basingstoke and NY: Palgrave, 2009) and has edited two collections of articles (for French History, 2011, and The History of European Ideas, 2009). Recent published work concerns the environmental history of early modern Paris, the historical legacy of the Paris of Louis XIV, and the investment of slave wealth in urban property during the French Revolution. He is currently writing a book, Paris-on-the-Atlantic (Editions Vendémiaire), focusing on the French capital as a social and economic hinterland of early globalization of the eighteenth century. As a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, his principal focus was to collaborate with Paul Cheney on The French Republic and the Plantation Economy: Saint-Domingue, 1794–1803. He furthered research to compare different “unfree” forms of labor that displaced slavery in the French Empire.

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