Louise Seaward is a final year PhD student who has been studying History at the University of Leeds since 2004. Her research interests lie in the political and cultural history of ancien régime France and the French Revolution.
During the course of her Master’s degree she travelled to Neuchâtel to explore the STN archives. Here, she undertook research closely connected with, but separate from the French Book Trade project. Her MA dissertation focused on the STN’s correspondence with government officials from across Europe and in November 2009 it was awarded the Marion Sharples for best Master’s Dissertation from the School of History at the University of Leeds.
Louise’s doctoral research centres on the issue of censorship and considers how the French government strove to police the literature produced outside France’s borders. This work interacts with the French Book Trade project and also aims to engage with debates relating to the nature and strength of the eighteenth-century book trade and the role of print in the origins of the French Revolution. Louise presented her work on the STN at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2012 and discussed her findings further in June and July 2012 at the conferences of SHARP and the Society for the Study of French History.