Rod Phillips

Biography

I started as a historian of the family, especially of marriage breakdown and divorce. My doctoral dissertation was on divorce during the French Revolution; in 1792, the Revolutionary government legalized divorce for the first time in France, and the court and other records provide early evidence of marriage stress and dissolution a good hundred years before the rise of mass divorce in Europe. I later worked on the history of divorce in New Zealand (where I was born and where I had my first teaching job). I then expanded my scope to the western world more broadly and researched divorce further in the U.K., Sweden, and Norway. I still work a little on the history of the family, and I am editor of the Journal of Family History, the journal of record in the field. In the late 1990s I turned to the history of wine. Wine has long been one of my passions, and writing its history seemed a logical thing to do. After I began to teach a course at Carleton on the history of alcohol, I broadened my scope to cover alcoholic beverages generally. More recently, I combined my French and alcohol expertise to work on the history of French wine. In addition to writing monographs on these subjects I am the General Editor of a multi-volume work by 50 historians on the cultural history of alcohol.

Research Interest

history of the family