Suzanne Levin is an historian specializing in the Age of Revolution(s) of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with a particular focus on the French Revolution. She earned her doctorate from the Université Paris Nanterre in 2019, from which institution she also holds a Master’s degree, as well as a BA in History and French from Oberlin College. From 2021 to 2025, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples. Interested in the complex relationship between ideas and politics, her work examines the use of various conceptual tools in adapting policy to new contexts and challenges, seeking to trace revolutionary policy from debate to adoption to practical application. Her doctoral thesis was published in L’Harmattan’s research prize collection in 2022 under the title La République de Prieur de la Marne. Défendre les droits de l’homme en état de guerre, 1792-an II. She is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of a collected volume intitled Natural Rights and Politics in Early Modern Europe, based on a research workshop she co-organized in Naples in 2023.
Her research for the Turin Humanities Programme will reinterrogate the relationship between socio-economic policy and theories of political economy in the French Revolution, through the analysis of theoretical texts produced by deputies to the French National Convention before, during, and after their legislative mandate. By studying the ways in which deputies intervened in late 18th century debates on the complex relationships between commerce, rights and needs, as well as how their views evolved and diverged, this research aims to enable a more complete understanding not only of French Revolutionary theories of political economy and their place within broader debates, but also of the Convention’s policy interventions in the various domains touched by political economy, beyond the immediate political context of their adoption.
