Professor Jonathan Conlin

• British cultural history, 1700 - present
• History of Museums and Arts Broadcasting
• History of the Oil Industry
• William Ewart Gladstone and Victorian Intellectual History
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Author, envoy, soldier, spy, the Chevalière d'Eon (1728-1810) crossed boundaries of gender and nation, moving between Britain and France, and male and female. For thirty years, in peace and in war, the Chevalière served the French crown as censor, secret agent, dragoon officer and diplomat - presenting as a man. After her "conversion" (her term) she spent the following thirty years as a celebrity, famed for giving virtuoso displays of swordswomanship wearing her signature black dress. Londoners referred to d'Eon as "the wonder of her sex", and took pride in having provided d'Eon with a refuge at a time when she faced the menace of kidnap and incarceration in the Bastille at the hands of King Louis XV's agents.

     Beginning in the 1770s d'Eon began drafting and redrafting a series of life writings in a range of genres. Some took the form of legal depositions, others memoir, still others adopted more dramatic form, built around dialogues with notable men and women of her age (some of these were individuals d'Eon had met in person, while others were figures she had not had any contact with). A short autobiography appeared in 1779, but otherwise none of these texts appeared in print during d'Eon's lifetime - despite d'Eon securing advances from at least two London publishers eager to help her tell her story. 

     Historians of trans are usually reliant on the texts produced by such self-described cis male "experts" (surgeons such as those who examined d'Eon's body, sexologists such as Havelock Ellis), often for want of texts and images produced by their subjects themselves. It is certainly possible to read such sources against the grain, and recover something of the trans experience. D'Eon's case is unusual in that we have hundreds of pages of unpublished life writings, as well as diaries that record what d'Eon did, day by day, for more than forty years of her life. Deon was also a prolific libelliste and author, publishing a thirteen-volume set of Les Loisirs du Chevalier d'Eon. Hers was a highly curated self, and this curation included writing herself into a history of femmes fortes ("strong women"). D'Eon strongly identified with Joan of Arc, the Amazons and medieval saints who had "disguised their sex in the service of God". D'Eon could be seen as both trans and as a historian of trans avant la lettre.

     I first began working on d'Eon in 2001, exploring her relationship with her friend John Wilkes, a radical politician and journalist whose rhetoric and career were in some ways analogous (contemporaries certainly spotted the resemblances). I published this research in the English Historical Review in 2003. Along with Simon Burrows and a team from the University of Leeds (where much of d'Eon's archive is held), I then co-edited a 2007 volume entitled The Chevalier D'Eon and His Worlds. As the title we chose indicates, our understanding of d'Eon has evolved. In my 2026 biography I used the pronoun she/her when addressing the period after d'Eon's "conversion". When addressing the earlier years, I do not use any gendered pronouns. 

In 2028 we will celebrate d'Eon's 300th birthday. Working in collaboration with specialists in trans history and members of both the trans community and citizens of Tonnerre (her hometown in Burgundy) I am developing plans for exhibitions, performances, school/community workshops intended to provoke questions around gender identity, celebrity and selfhood. To keep up with my d'Eon discoveries and these projects, please check out my Instagram, DeonTraces.