Anoush Terjanian specialises in the history of commerce, empire, and political thought in eighteenth-century France.  Her new book, Commerce and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century French Political Thought, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. This research uncovers a tension between “gentle” and “odious” forms of commerce, clustered around the problems of luxury, slavery, piracy, and monopoly.  Recognised as such by political thinkers and public intellectuals in the period, this tension indicated an ambivalence toward commerce characterised by the simultaneous exultation of commerce and fear of its deviant forms.  The centrepiece of the study is the ten-volume best-seller, the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) – a comparative history of the European empires headed by the Abbé Raynal.  Terjanian is currently co-editing Book 17 of the Histoire des deux Indes for the first critical edition of the work.

Terjanian teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Old Regime France, the French Revolution, the European Enlightenments and a seminar on Commerce and Its Critics in Eighteenth-Century Europe.  She coordinated “Great Books of Love,” the introductory course for ECU’s Great Books Program and also enjoyed acting as a historical consultant and pre-concert lecturer for the School of Music’s performance of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites.  Terjanian is an alumna of the Canadian Parliamentary Internship Programme and previously worked as a G-7 Summit Officer at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Affairs in Ottawa.  She was a Fellow and, later, an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and most recently a Visiting Professor at McGill University with the French Atlantic History Group.