About
Nicole Bauer is a cultural historian specializing in early modern France. Her first book, Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency, examined the changing attitudes towards secrecy in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France. Her new book, Zen and the Anxious Academic: Resilience and Resistance Through Contemplative Practice, looks at issues facing academics today such as burnout, anxiety, imposter syndrome, and balancing activism with scholarship, and how indigenous wisdom and ancient, contemplative practices can help modern teachers and scholars. She is also working on a book exploring mystical experiences, compassion, and ideas of the self in Enlightenment Europe.
Her research has been supported by the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies where she was the inaugural fellow, the University of Siegen (Universität Siegen), and the Institut français d’Amérique. Passionate about public humanities, she is also the Associate Director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, and has written public scholarship for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, and others. She teaches courses on the Enlightenment, gender and queer theory, and dabbles in film studies.
Education
- Ph.D., The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
- M.A., Yale University
- B.A., University of California-Berkeley
Research interests and areas of expertise
- Early modern France
- Cultural and intellectual history
- Secrecy
- Ideas of the self