Lectures

The Pitfalls of Eighteenth Century Biography: Denis Diderot, a Case Study

Date/Time
Thursday, May 9, 2019
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Location
Royce Hall, Room 306
10745 Dickson Plaza

—Andrew Curran, Wesleyan University

In this wide-ranging talk, Andrew Curran will introduce his new book, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), before taking up the question of what it is like to shift from writing intellectual history for an academic audience to writing a biography for a general audience.

Andrew Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. Curran’s first book, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe, was published by Studies on Voltaire at the University of Oxford in 2001. His second book, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment, appeared at Johns Hopkins University Press in 2011.

Curran has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes académiques. He is also the recipient of numerous grants, most recently a Public Scholar fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that made the Diderot book possible.

No registration is required.

Questions?
Contact the Center at 310-206-8552.