'The Art of Thinking Freely'
Andrew Curran, Philippe Roger
Join us for a conversation with Andrew S. Curran, professor of the humanities at Wesleyan University, about the influential French Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot. Most famous for his role as the editor of the world’s first encyclopedia, Diderot also had a profound impact through his many writings critiquing the monarchy, slavery and empire, and religious institutions and by arguing for freedom of thought and expression. Curran draws on his book Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Penguin Random House) to explore how Diderot’s work reshaped political thought in ways that continue to influence our democratic culture. Curran is joined by UVA’s Philippe Roger, professor of French and renowned specialist of the French Enlightenment.
The Nau Lab's “Touchstones of Democracy” series explores key events, places, thinkers, and texts that inform the history and principles of democracy. Join us for the fall 2023 conversations, which are produced by the Karsh Institute of Democracy and the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. WATCH THE VIDEO:
Speakers
Andrew Curran
William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities, Wesleyan University
Fellow in the History of Medicine, New York Academy of Medicine
Andrew Curran
William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities, Wesleyan University
Fellow in the History of Medicine, New York Academy of Medicine
Andrew Curran’s latest book is an edited edition, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr, entitled Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race, which has been nominated for a NAACP Image Award for the 2023 Outstanding Non-Fiction work. Curran’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, El Païs, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of three books, most recently Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, The Australian, NRC, Open Letters Review, and The Irish Times. His previous book, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice and also received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the French Académie des sciences d’outre-mer.
Curran is a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques. He lives in Connecticut where he is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.
Philippe Roger
Professor of French, University of Virginia
Philippe Roger
Professor of French, University of Virginia
Philippe Roger is a professor of French at The University of Virginia.
A specialist of Eigtheenth-century Literature and Culture, with a particular focus on the Revolutionary period, he has also written extensively on literary theory and Barthes’œuvre. The books he wrote or directed on Sade (La Philosophie dans le pressoir ; Sade, écrire la crise) have laid ground for a scholarly approach to the ill-famed author. His essay Roland Barthes, roman, written shortly after Barthes’ accidental death, is regarded as a book of reference on the late critic, semiologist, and writer. A third major field of interest for Philippe Roger is French-American relations from the Age of Enlightement to our days. Of his Prize-winning book The American enemy. A History of French Anti-Americanism, Edward Rothstein of The New York Times wrote : «Mr. Roger almost singlehandledy creates a new field of study». Among his current interests and projects are a book on sacrifice and self-sacrifice in the Age of Reason and a research on the literary constructs of “heroism”.
Since 1996, Philippe Roger has been the managing editor of Critique , the monthly journal founded by George Bataille in 1946.
Website: https://french.as.virginia.edu/people/philippe-roger