Professor Hamscher specializes in the Institutional, Legal, and Social History of Early Modern France, and the Cultural History of U.S. Cemeteries.

Select Publications

-- The Parlement of Paris After the Fronde, 1653-1673 (Pittsburgh, 1976)

-- The Conseil Privé and the Parlements in the Age of Louis XIV: A Study in French Absolutism (Philadelphia, 1987)

-- ed., Kansas Cemeteries in History (Manhattan, KS, 2005)

A dozen or so scholarly articles, essays, and book chapters concerning early modern French history published in the U.S. and France; the most recent contribution being “Une Contestatation évitée: La Prétendue lettre du Parlement de Paris, 1667,” in Bernard Barbiche et al., eds., Pouvoirs, contestations et comportements dans l'Europe moderne (Paris, 2005), 659-73.

In connection with a scholarly interest in death and dying in history: “‘Scant Excuse for the Headstone’: The Memorial Park Cemetery in Kansas,” Kansas History 25 (2002): 124-43; “Talking Tombstones: History in the Cemetery,” OAH Magazine of History 17 (2003): 40-45; “Pictorial Headstones: Business, Culture, and the Expression of Individuality in the Contemporary Cemetery,” Markers: Annual Journal of the Association of Gravestone Studies 23 (2006): 6-35; “Death and Dying in History,” in Christopher Moreman, ed., Teaching Death and Dying (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

Current Project: The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670-1789 (forthcoming; contract signed with the University of Delaware Press)

Courses

History 101, Rise of Europe
History 297, Introduction to the Humanities Honors
History 520, Death and Dying in History
History 570, Seventeenth-Century Europe
History 583, France, 1400-1715
History 987, Writing/Publishing History

Additional Information

Three fellowships and one grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society; Resident Member, The Institute for Advanced Study, 1988-89; Elected Member, Société de l’Histoire de France; formerly, board of editors, French Historical Studies and the University Press of Kansas; four undergraduate teaching awards, and the distinguished graduate faculty award, KSU.