Paul Cheney, Associate Professor of European History at the University of Chicago, is a European historian who specializes in eighteenth-century France. Before beginning his PhD training in history at Columbia University, he studied political economy at the New School for Social Research. He has taught at Columbia University, the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin and Queen’s University of Belfast.
Broadly speaking, his field of interest is the contextual study of social and political thought. In his recent work, he explores how eighteenth-century writers approached what is now termed globalization. How, they asked, was the outward extension of European commerce, particularly into the periphery of its Atlantic colonial establishments, inwardly transforming the material, cultural and political world of Europe?