Donna Bohanan
Joseph A. Kicklighter Professor of History
College of Liberal Arts

PhD — Emory University
MA — Emory University
BA — Hendrix College

Donna Bohanan is the Joseph A. Kicklighter Professor of History. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on early modern Europe, which include her course on daily life and popular culture, "Private Lives and Public Places in Early Modern Europe" and her course on "Fashion, Consumption, and the World of Goods in Early Modern Europe." In addition, she regularly teaches in the world history program. For her role in the classroom, she has been honored with the Gerald and Emily Leischuck Award, and twice she has been chosen to deliver the "Final Lecture" to the senior class. Dr. Bohanan's research concerns the nobility of seventeenth-century France. Her first book, Old and New Nobility in Aix-en-Provence, 1600-1695: Portrait of an Urban Elite, appeared in 1992, and her second, Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France, came out in 2001. More recently she published the book, Fashion Beyond Versailles: Design and Consumption in Seventeenth-Century France. In this book, she explores consumption patterns among noble families in the frontier province of Dauphiné; here consumption became for local elites a crucial means of defining their position in provincial society. Specifically, Bohanan uses notary inventories of noble estates to reconstruct the contents and decorative schemes of their homes.