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Dan Edelstein
William H. Bonsall Professor of French, Professor, by courtesy, of History and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution
Department
French and Italian
CV Link
Degrees / Education
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, French (2004)
Licence ès Lettres, Université de Genève, French, English, Latin (1999)
Born in Ithaca, NY, I moved to Geneva, Switzerland when I was eleven. After attending the Collège Calvin, I studied literature at the University of Geneva; I then returned to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving my PhD in French literature in 2004. I joined the Department of French & Italian at Stanford that same year.
I started off my career as a dix-huitièmiste, working on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I have since moved more into the history of political thought. I am the author of four books (three with the University of Chicago Press, the most recent with Princeton). The first is on French revolutionary Terror; the second, on the genealogy of the Enlightenment; the third on the early-modern history of human rights; the fourth is an intellectual history of revolution from Thucydides to Lenin, entitled The Revolution to Come (Princeton). I am currently working on monograph about the history of (the idea of) Western culture.
I've edited or co-edited seven volumes of essays: "Myth and Modernity" (co-edited with Bettina Lerner, Yale French Studies); "The Super-Enlightenment" (Voltaire Foundation, at Oxford University); "Scripting Revolution" (co-edited with Keith Baker, Stanford University Press); "Let There Be Enlightenment" (co-edited with Anton Matytsin, Johns Hopkins University Press); "Networks of Enlightenment" (co-edited with Chloe Edmonson, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment); "Power and Time" (co-edtied with Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley, University of Chicago Press), and a volume (with Jennifer Pitts) for the Cambridge History of Rights. I was a PI for the "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project.
I started off my career as a dix-huitièmiste, working on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I have since moved more into the history of political thought. I am the author of four books (three with the University of Chicago Press, the most recent with Princeton). The first is on French revolutionary Terror; the second, on the genealogy of the Enlightenment; the third on the early-modern history of human rights; the fourth is an intellectual history of revolution from Thucydides to Lenin, entitled The Revolution to Come (Princeton). I am currently working on monograph about the history of (the idea of) Western culture.
I've edited or co-edited seven volumes of essays: "Myth and Modernity" (co-edited with Bettina Lerner, Yale French Studies); "The Super-Enlightenment" (Voltaire Foundation, at Oxford University); "Scripting Revolution" (co-edited with Keith Baker, Stanford University Press); "Let There Be Enlightenment" (co-edited with Anton Matytsin, Johns Hopkins University Press); "Networks of Enlightenment" (co-edited with Chloe Edmonson, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment); "Power and Time" (co-edtied with Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley, University of Chicago Press), and a volume (with Jennifer Pitts) for the Cambridge History of Rights. I was a PI for the "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project.