Matthew McDonald is a political and cultural historian of France in the context of early modern Europe. His research, conducted under the supervision of David A. Bell, is on the preponderance of French as Europe’s major international language from the mid-eighteenth century through the Napoleonic Wars.

His dissertation, “A Linguistic Archipelago: The Spread of European French, 1740–1815,” narrates how a geographically wide but socially restricted community of Francophone elites used the language as a means of social distinction. It gained traction both within France and abroad as a means of separating elites from commoners. At the same time, French granted access to a practical cosmopolitanism through which outsiders could define themselves as “European."

Matthew’s work examines to what extent the French language and French culture were prevalent in a variety of fields: from diplomacy, administration and sociability to book printing, scientific research and the pursuit of luxury. He also shows how the language retained its associations with distinction in the nineteenth century as it became the idiom of state-building at home and of soft power and colonial ambition abroad.

Matthew’s research on French cosmopolitanism has taken him to archives across Europe and America. His research in Germany has been supported by the DAAD (in exchange with the Freie Universität Berlin), by the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and by the Forschungszentrum Gotha der Universität Erfurt as a Herzog Ernst Fellow. He has also conducted research at Uppsala University in Sweden with the support of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Matthew spent the fall semesters of 2018 and 2019 as a visiting student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and held a graduate fellowship in 2020–21 at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

In the fall semester of 2021, Matthew will be a fellow at the Forschungszentrum Europa der Universität Trier in conjunction with the European Research Council consolidator project “Pamphlets and Patrons.” He currently holds a Dean’s Completion/PGRA Fellowship from Princeton University; he will defend in December 2021 and teach a seminar on the Enlightenment as a Postgraduate Research Associate at Princeton in the spring semester of 2022.

Matthew previously received a Bachelor of Arts with honors in history at the University of Chicago, where he studied classicism and state-building in the reign of Louis XIV. A classical violinist and singer, Matthew has curated historical exhibits for the New York Philharmonic. He performs on campus with the group Early Music Princeton.

Publications

“‘A Society of Men of Letters’: Provincial Cosmopolitanism and Swiss Sociability at the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel.” Forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 55 (2021–2022).

“Striving After Style: Francophone Diplomacy in Prussia, 1740–1786.” Forthcoming in French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar, vol. 9 (2021).