People

Faculty

Guillaume Ansart (French)
I have two chief research interests: aesthetic and sociological approaches to the 18th-century novel, and 18th- and 19th-century political theory, in both cases with a particular focus on France.

Fritz Breithaupt (German)
Fritz Breithaupt works on German and European 18th and 19th century fiction and intellectual history. Among his recent projects are works on the self, money, the invention of trauma, and theories of empathy. Favorite authors include: Goethe, Moritz, Lessing, Rousseau, Kant, Holderlin, Hegel, and Hoffmann.

Hall Bjornstad (French and Italian)
As a scholar of seventeenth-century France, my first monograph, Créature sans créateur (PU Laval, 2011), was a study of Pascal's anthropology. My present book project proposes a new approach to
absolutism, through a study of the royal exemplarity of Louis XIV. I turn to the eighteenth-century for its reinterpretation of the past, and to the interdisciplinary meetings of the Center for animated
discussions of the cultural and philosophical roots of enlightenments and revolutions.

Michel Chaouli (German)
In general, I don't find centuries to be very interesting. But as centuries go, the eighteenth is quite outstanding. It not only managed to give rise to a remarkable mix of people, ideas, conflicts, and products, but it also presents these to us with a mixture of familiarity and strangeness that I find to be productive for thought. At present, I am interested in aesthetic thought and the intersections of literature, philosophy, and science. I am working on a book on Kant's Critique of Judgment and on a study of the senses in the long eighteenth century.

Aurelian Craiutu (Political Science)
Aurelian Craiutu (Ph. D. Princeton, 1999) teaches courses in the history of modern political thought in the Department of Political Science. His research interests focus on modern French political and social thought, the French Revolution and its interpreters, liberalism and conservatism. Craiutu has published extensively on Guizot, Madame de Stael, and Tocqueville. His new book, A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 (Princeton, Feb. 2012) includes chapters on 18th-cy thinkers (Montesquieu, Necker, and the Monarchiens) as well as on figures who straddle the 18th and 19th centuries (Benjamin Constant and Mme de Stael).

Konstantin Dierks (History)
I am a historian of early America, the Atlantic world, and the British empire in the early-modern period spanning from the 17th into the 19th century. My first book, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, focused on the cultural, social, economic, and political history of letter writing and communications in the early-modern anglophone Atlantic World. My current research traces the shift in American geographical understandings of the wider world in the transition from colonial to post-colonial America, between 1660 and 1860.

Michael Dodson (History)
I am a cultural historian of British imperialism in South Asia, with a special interest in the ways in which imperialism was reflected within 'traditional' Sanskrit religious scholarship in northern India. This is the subject of my book Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770-1880, published in 2007 by Palgrave Macmillan. My main point of contact with the eighteenth century is an interest in understanding the ways in which British imperialism in Asia was facilitated through the production of particular kinds of 'world history' narratives, including those of orientalism. I am currently working on a project which traces the evolution of British historical scholarship on the Asian world during the eighteenth century, with an emphasis upon the demise of classically-oriented approaches and the simultaneous rise of philology and archaeology.

Jonathan Elmer (English)
My research attempts to demonstrate that literature is good to think with, that the figurative imagination provides uniquely supple and condensed treatments of a host of historical, psychological, political, and conceptual problems. I am an antebellum Americanist by training—my first book was on Edgar Allan Poe and mass culture in America—but my research and teaching over the past decade has increasingly focused on colonial and early national eras, and on writers of the anglophone Atlantic world from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson to Herman Melville. Some of this research animates On Lingering and Being Last: Fictions of Race and Sovereignty in the New World (Fordham 2008). I am currently working on a project exploring the nature of play as a social, aesthetic, and interpretive phenomenon. I also play the trombone.

Michelle Facos (Art History and Jewish Studies)
My research spans the "long nineteenth century" with particular attention to the ways art production, display, and collecting were affected by the seismic changes during this era. One of my current projects, The Copenhagen Art Academy: Innovation in the Era of Friedrich and Runge, examines the conditions contributing to singular developments in the work of artists studying at the Copenhagen Art Academy during the period 1760 to 1820.

Mary Favret (English)
Though most of my research and teaching attends to the literature of late 18th and early 19th-century Britain, it has turned increasingly to Britain's place amidst the influxes and refluxes of a larger world. For several years what held my attention was the global nature of the wars in which Great Britain was engaged, especially at the turn of the century, and the strange effects those distant wars had on those who remained at home.  My most recent book, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton UP 2010) aims to understand the development of modern war throughout the 18c, with its culmination in the world-wide wars of the Napoleonic era. This interest has led me to explore in turn questions of mediation, developments in science, and studies of affect and temporality. These questions persist in my more recent research on the history of the difficulty of reading—what might be thought of as the pains of reading. On the most general level, my research seems to find itself returning to situations where feeling meets unfeeling (as in wartime). Visual and material culture always aid my thinking, but in the end the aesthetic power of language most compels my attention.

Constance Furey (Religious Studies)
I am interested in the eighteenth century because of its reputation as a secularizing age. My first book, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters, explores the religious roots of the putatively secular Republic of Letters, and my current project looks at how devotional literature, by women in particular, influenced assumptions about authorship and reading in English literature.

Oscar Kenshur (Comparative Literature)
Since publishing my critique of ideological essentialism in Critical Inquiry, and tracing the ideological mutability of ideas in my book Dilemmas of Enlightenment, I have continued to focus on ways in which writers use an interplay of rhetorical and logical strategies to try to reconcile their intellectual and ideological commitments. Most recently, I have been applying these techniques of analysis to the history of ethics and aesthetics.

Sarah Knott (History)
I am interested in what made the late eighteenth century revolutionary. My first book traced the uses of sensibility in the American Revolution—how revolutionaries sought to make a break from the British Empire, and to make new selves and a new society, by the canny deployment of sentiment. My new research tacks across the revolutionary orbits of North America, France, and Haiti. How, I ask, was revolution witnessed by contemporaries? And how where their first-person accounts circulated, translated, and reinterpreted across the revolutionary Atlantic world? A second set of interests are captured in the title of an interdisciplinary volume co-edited with Barbara Taylor: Women, Gender and Enlightenment.

Jesse Molesworth (English)
My work explores the intersection between the European Enlightenment and the literary form most often claimed as its logical outgrowth, the novel. In my Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2010), I argue for the novel as an agent of re-enchantment, one that sought not so much to buttress ascendant scientific principles but, rather more radically, to heal the rift between animistic and materialist worldviews. I am currently at work on another book which investigates the historical construction of time within eighteenth-century literature and culture.

Richard Nash (English)
I am interested in British Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, with a special interest in Literature and Science, concentrating on the Restoration and Early Eigtheenth Century. My last (Yahoo) book was on the figure of the Wild Man in Eighteenth-Century England; my current (Houyhnhnm) project focuses on the origins of the thoroughbred racehorse and what it means to invent an animal. Both projects allow me to explore Nature/Culture hybridity and the origins of Modernity.

Eyal Peretz (Comparative Literature)
My main interest is thinking in a new way the relations between philosophy and the arts, and more precisely between of the philosophical understanding of what meaning or sense is, that is, what can be called the philosophical logic of sense, and the way that literature and the other arts have understood meaning, or the artistic understanding of a logic of sense. I have published a book on Melville's Moby-Dick and am about to publish a book on the films of Brian De Palma where I have started to interrogate these questions. I am currently starting a project on Diderot who seems to me to constitute a major turning point in the history of the thinking of philosophy's relation to the arts.

William Rasch (German)
My research deals explicitly with 20th-century German political, legal, and social-theoretical thinkers, which means that my research deals with the 18th-century philosophical tradition as it has been received and developed during the past 100 turbulent years or so. My teaching more often explicitly addresses the German Enlightenment and the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars on German literary and political thought. I am as interested in Clausewitz as Kant, in Kleist's political writings as in his stories, and far more interested in Schmitt on partisan warfare than Habermas on perpetual peace.

Robert Schneider (History)
Although my current work focuses on seventeenth-century France, I have written extensively on the eighteenth century and also teach courses that at least traverse the period. More importantly, perhaps, it is clear to me that the field of eighteenth-century studies has generated some of the most interesting, innovative and provocative historical work out there, work that has served as a model for my own research into an earlier period.

Ron Sela (Central Eurasian Studies)
My work examines political and cultural self-representation in Central Asian sources, focusing on the eighteenth century - an era of remarkable transformations in the perceptions of cultural and political boundaries, the adaptations of old and new sources of inspiration and authority, and new understandings concerning the individual's role in society. I have been exploring some of these changes in my Ritual and Authority in Central Asia (2003). I am currently working on a book about Central Asia's emerging 18th-century hero by examining a contemporary, hitherto unstudied corpus of Tamerlane's legendary biographies.