Dr. Devin Vartija

Vita

Bachelor of Arts and Science, 2010
Master of Arts in History, 2012
Ph.D. in History, 2018

Scientific Employment or Activities

Assistant Professor of History, Utrecht University

Important scientific functions and memberships

Co-Director of the ‘Futures of Democracy’ Research Platform at Utrecht University
Board Member of the Dutch-Belgian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Duration of the scholarship

18 September – 27 October, 2023

Research Project

Equality and Commercial Sociability in Enlightenment Paris

Inequality lay at the core of the political and social order of ancien regime France. It is for this reason that the French revolutionaries’ assertion that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” is breath-taking in its simplicity and scope. While the revolutionaries had something less universal in mind than what this statement seems to imply, the fundamental change in worldview reflected and reinforced in this declaration continues to capture our attention and imagination. How did equality gain the benefit of the doubt in eighteenth-century French minds? This project investigates the role played by nascent capitalism in shifting commonly held assumptions about equality and inequality in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary French society and culture. It builds on recent research that has demonstrated that capitalism disrupted traditional social inequalities not by leading to class struggle, but by creating the social spaces in which rank was temporarily suspended and an abstract equality of individuals could be assumed. Using the reports of the Crown’s secret agents sent to monitor discussion in cafes and theatres, I investigate how the vibrant world of commercialized public space taught ordinary people that their judgments matter, making a community of equally autonomous individuals first thinkable, then desirable by the century’s end.

Publications from the Field of Enlightenment research

Standalone writings:

Vartija, Devin J. 2023 (forthcoming). ‘“Teaching men to doubt”: Epistemological Debates in Enlightenment Encyclopaedias,’ in Credulity in the Age of Reason, ed. Giulia Iannuzzi,
Claudia Lora Márquez, Sylvie Moret Petrini, Brianna Robertson-Kirkland. Paris: Champion. 15 pages.

Vartija, Devin J. 2023. ‘The Historiography of Race in Enlightenment Thought,’ In Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. London: Bloomsbury.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350892880.196

Vartija, Devin J. 2022. ‘Natural Equality and Racial Inequality: An Enlightenment Paradox?’ In Racializing Humankind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ and Racism,
ed. Julian T. D. Gärtner and Malin S. Wilckens. Bielefeld: University of Bielefeld Press, 215-233.

Vartija, Devin J. 2021. The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Intellectual History of the Modern Age Series.

Vartija, Devin J. 2021. ‘Revisiting Enlightenment Racial Classification: Time and the Question of Human Diversity,’ Intellectual History Review 31, no. 4: 603–625.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2020.1794161.

Vartija, Devin J. 2020. ‘Wat de Verlichting bijeenhield: Gelijkheid, maatschappij en godsdienst in achttiende-eeuwse encyclopedieën,’ Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 133, no.
2:205–27.

Vartija, Devin J. 2017. ‘Empathy, Equality, and the Radical Enlightenment.’ In Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, ed. Steffen Ducheyne. London: Routledge, 274–91.

Articles in magazines and anthologies

Vartija, Devin J. 2020. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue “Enlightenment and Modernity,”’ International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 8, nos. 3–4: 235–45.
https://doi.org/10.1163/22130624-20200003.