Department of History

Pernille Røge

  • Associate Professor
  • Associate Chair

Watch Dr. Røge discuss how she brings research in to every course.

Fields

Eighteenth-century France
Age of Revolutions
Early Modern European Empires
Atlantic History
European Intellectual History

Teaching

Undergraduate courses:
Hist 1126/Soc 1386 French Revolution. 
Hist 1115 The West and the World. 
Hist 1001 Introductory Seminar/European Enlightenment. 
Hist 1000 Capstone Seminar/Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World
Hist 0103 Europe in the 18th Century
Hist 1901 Independent Undergraduate Study.

Graduate Seminars: 
Hist 2160 Political Economy and European Imperial Rivalry.
Hist 2721 Atlantic History to 1800
Hist 2729 Seas, Peoples, and Empires
Hist 2902 Independent Study

Education & Training

  • PhD, University of Cambridge, 2010

Representative Publications

Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, October 2019)

Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (1700-1850), eds. Pepijn Brandon, Niklas Frykman, and Pernille Røge, International Review of Social History, 64, Special Issue 27, (April 2019)

The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World, eds. Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge (Palgrave Macmillan, October 2013)

For a full list of publications, please see CV.

Research Interests

I am trained as a scholar of eighteenth-century France and its colonial empire, with a broader interest in early modern European expansion. My first book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802, offers an exploration of efforts to reinvent the French colonial empire between the mid-eighteenth century and the rise of Napoleon. The book examines the reciprocal impacts of economic ideas, colonial policy, and practices as they evolved in France, the French Caribbean, and West Africa. It also aims to rethink the French Revolution as a moment of imperial rupture between France’s so-called ‘first’ and ‘second’ colonial empires. In my second book project, A Gateway to Empire: Danish Colonial Expansion in a Transimperial World, c. 1660-1815, I trace how a small power on the European periphery built and maintained a thriving global presence in an age of great-power rivalry. Based on archival research in Northern European archives, the book privileges four themes: Denmark’s role as gatekeeper to the Baltic Sea; the crown’s espousal of a policy of “colonization by invitation” which enabled foreigners to help build and profit from Danish colonization; the policy of neutrality in times of war; and the commercial system that combined free ports and protectionist policies. Alongside these research projects, I am involved in an interdisciplinary project on Gun Violence and its Histories. I also convene Pitt’s Early Modern Worlds Initiative which fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and research among early modernists at the University of Pittsburgh.