French and Italian Expert - Dan Edelstein

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Dan Edelstein
Associate Professor of French, by courtesy Professor of History, Director of Undergraduate Studies (DLCL), Chair of Undergraduate Studies (French)

Biography

Dan Edelstein works primarily on eighteenth-century France, which also serves as a convenient launching pad for raids into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the early modern period. His first book, The Terror of Natural Right:® Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), examines how liberal natural right theories, classical republicanism, and the myth of the golden age became fused in eighteenth-century political culture, only to emerge as a violent ideology during the Terror. This book won the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize. He recently published a second book entitled The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming Dec. 2010), which explores how the idea of an Enlightenment emerged in French academic circles around the 1720's. He is currently working on two book projects: first, on the concept of "counter-mythologies" during the Enlightenment and in the aftermath of the French Revolution; and second, on the "myth of the Revolution."

With J.P. Daughton, Edelstein co-directs the French Culture Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, and with Paula Findlen, is a principal investigator for a project called "Mapping the Republic of Letters," which received a three-year Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities grant, and a "Digging into Data" grant from the NEH (more about the project in the Stanford Report or in the New York Times) . He is a founding editor of Republics of Letters, where he also contributes to the Editors' blog.

 

Key Works

  • The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
  • The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010.
  • The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  • “War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies, 31.2, Special Issue on “War, Culture, and Society,” ed. David A. Bell and Martha Hanna (forthcoming, Spring 2008): 229-62.
  • “The Birth of Ideology from the Spirit of Myth: Georges Sorel among the Idéologues”, in The Re-enchantement of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age.  Eds. Joshua Landy and Michael Saler.  Stanford University Press, 2008 (forthcoming).
  • Myth and Modernity, ed. Dan Edelstein and Bettina Lerner, Special Issue of Yale French Studies, 111 (2007).
  • “Hostis Humani Generis: Devils, Natural Right, Terror, and the French Revolution,” Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought, 141 (2007): 57-81.
  • The Digital Encyclopédie brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss and test the possibilities for research and pedagogy of the newly digitized Encyclopédie. This project uses data mining of digitized texts to improve our understanding of how the Encyclopédie was produced. The goal is to shed light not only on this individual work, but also on the shape and status of knowledge in the eighteenth century. Completion of the project will make available on the ARTFL site the complete lists of borrowed texts, integrating this information into the Encyclopédie database and will result in a jointly publish a detailed study of the preliminary results. Chairs: Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein.

 

Prof. Edelstein in the News