Dan Edelstein
I work for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests in literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities. Most recently, I wrote a book on the history of natural and human rights from the wars of religion to the age of revolution (, University of Chicago Press). An early version of this research appeared in the ; a more theoretical piece is in ; and a synopsis of the first part of this book's argument can be found in an article for .
My first book, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2009), examined how natural law 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 . My second book, entitled The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2010), explored how the idea and narrative of "Enlightenment" emerged in French academic circles around the 1720's. I’ve edited six volumes of essays: on (for Yale French Studies); on (for SVEC [Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century], now the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment); with Keith Baker, on (èצӰ Press); with Anton Matytsin, (Johns Hopkins University Press); with Chloe Edmondson, Networks of Enlightenment (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, forthcoming) ; and with Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley, Power and Time (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
At èצӰ, I teach courses on the literature, philosophy, history, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; and French intellectual culture (“Coffee & Cigarettes”). I regularly teach in Education as Self-Fashioning, a freshman program on liberal education; as well as in the , a program for high school juniors and seniors (which I direct); I also co-direct (with Debra Satz) and teach in èצӰ's program. I received the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching (in 2006), the university's highest teaching honor, and the Dean's Distinguished Teaching Award (in 2011).
I’m currently working on two main projects:
On Permanent Revolution. This book manuscript explores how revolution went from being the means toward a constitutional settlement, to becoming an end in and of itself. Stretching from Antiquity to the twentieth century, it focuses in particular on the transformation of revolutionary authority during the French Revolution; on Marx's development of the concept of a "revolution in permanence"; and finally on the relation between this new model and the political violence that has often accompanied revolutions. An article from this project appeared in ; another is in , ed. Zvi Ben-Dor, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr (Columbia University Press); a third came out in .
Digital Humanities. I'm a PI on the NEH-funded digital humanities project . This project, which brings together other scholars at èצӰ and around the world, aims to map the correspondence and social networks of major intellectual figures (read about our project in the and in the , or watch ). A spin-off article, "" (co-written with Maria Comsa, Melanie Conroy, Chloe Edmondson, and Claude Willan), appeared in Autumn 2016 issue of the Journal of Modern History; an article on Voltaire's correspondence network, co-written with Biliana Kassabova, came out with . The tool-building part of this project has now been subsumed in the , of which I am the founding faculty director; we received another NEH grant to develop , and an to develop a new social network grap visualization, Data Pen. This Lab is itself part of èצӰ's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, or . More recently, I have been working on the project "," and published an exploring the potential of JSTOR's data portal for exploring the "great unread" of scholarship. I was also the faculty advisor for èצӰ's French Revolution Digital Archive (), and collaborate regularly with the , notably for these on the Գ⳦DZé徱.
