Andrei Pesic
Andrei Pesic is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern France, with a special interest in the arts and economic thought.
His current book manuscript, entitled The Enlightenment in Concert: Music, Markets, and Inadvertent Secularization (under advance contract) uses the history of music to reexamine key questions in the history of the Enlightenment. It shows how concert series in eighteenth-century Europe brought sacred music into the marketplace for entertainment. The transformations resulting from this mixture of art, religion, and commerce illuminate how a process of secularization might emerge inadvertently due to competitive market pressures rather than as the result of an intentional project.
Other current projects include an intellectual history of the concept of competition and its use in annual painting displays in Paris (the salons) in the eighteenth century.
His research has been supported by the ACLS-Mellon Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), and the France-猫爪影像 Center. Prior to arriving at 猫爪影像, Andrei was a postdoctoral researcher at the New York Public Library (2015-16).
Andrei grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He earned his Ph.D. in history in 2015 from Princeton University. Prior to that, he earned an MSc at Oxford University in Economic and Social History (2008), where he held the Michael Von Clemm Fellowship, and an A.B. from Harvard in Economics (2007).
Publications and work in progress
,鈥&苍产蝉辫;Past and Present (2021) 250 (1): 135-69.
鈥溾&苍产蝉辫;French Historical Studies (2019) 42 (4): 563-593.
With L. Delpech, 鈥,鈥 Eighteenth-Century Music, vol. 11:1 (2014) pp. 149鈥52.
Book reviews
Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening: Abb茅 Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment in H-France June 2020.
Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier, Administrer les Menus Plaisirs du roi, in Annales HSS, July-September 2016, n掳 3, p. 759-61.
Michael Kwass, Contraband: The Making of a Global Underground, in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, vol. 23, no. 1, Spring 2016.
Conference organization
鈥Art and Power,鈥 猫爪影像, February 2018
Teaching at 猫爪影像
DLCL 100 CAPITALS: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and Peoples, Winter 2023-24, Autumn 2024-25
French 110/Art History 110, 鈥淔rench Painting from Watteau to Monet,鈥 Spring 2019
French 121/221, 鈥淛ean-Jacques Rousseau: Politics, Philosophy, and Literature,鈥 Fall 2018
French 130, 鈥淎n Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance French Literature,鈥 Fall 2019
French 131, 鈥淎bsolutism, Enlightenment, and Revolution in 17th- and 18th-Century France,鈥 Spring and Fall 2021
French 132, 鈥淟iterature, Revolutions, and Changes in 19th- and 20th-Century France,鈥 Spring 2022, Winter 2023, spring 2024
French 215/History 208G 鈥淭aking to the Streets: Experiencing the Age of Revolutions,鈥 Winter 2017
French 238/Art History 238C 鈥淎rt and the Market,鈥 Spring 2017, Spring 2021, Winter 2022, Spring 2023, winter 2024
French 252/Art History 252A, 鈥淎rt and Power,鈥 Spring 2018
Contact
Office Hours
Research Unit Groups
Research Interests
- Cultural History & Studies
- French Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
- Intellectual History
- Music Theory, History, and Criticism
- Visual Arts and Visual Culture