Dan Edelstein

Bio

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 2004. I joined the Department of French & Italian at Stanford that same year.

I work for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities (DH). I am the author of four books (three with the University of Chicago Press, the most recent with Princeton): the first on French revolutionary Terror; the second on the genealogy of the Enlightenment; the third on the early-modern history of human rights; and I recently completed an intellectual history of revolution from Thucydides to Lenin, entitled The Revolution to Come (Princeton).

I've edited or co-edited seven volumes of essays: "Myth and Modernity" (co-edited, 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, and the founding faculty director of the "Humanities + Design" research lab at CESTA.

I often teach courses on the literature, philosophy, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century French novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; French intellectual culture (“Coffee & Cigarettes”); liberal education ("Education as Self-Fashioning"); and historical networks ("Networks: Ecological, Revolutionary, and Digital"). Recently, most of my teaching as been for the COLLEGE program.

Academic Appointments

• Professor, French and Italian
• Professor (By courtesy), History
• Professor (By courtesy), Political Science

Administrative Appointments

• Faculty Director, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) (2021 - Present)
• Faculty Director, Stanford Introductory Studies (SIS), VPUE (2019 - Present)
• Chair, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) (2015 - 2019)
• Director, Department of French and Italian (2013 - 2014)
• Director, Stanford Summer Humanities Institute (2011 - Present)

Honors & Awards

• ACLS Digital Extension Grant, ACLS (2016-2017)
• W. Warren Shelden University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University (2013-2023)
• Digital Humanities Implementation Grant ("Networks in History"), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) (2013-2015)
• Faculty College, Stanford University (2011-2012)
• Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award, School of Humanities and Sciences (2011)
• National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, Fellow, Teagle Foundation (2010-2012)
• “Digging into Data” Challenge Grant (“Digging Into the Enlightenment”), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) (2010-2011)
• Oscar Kenshur Book Prize, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University/ASECS (2010)
• Fellowship at a Digital Humanities Center (ARTFL project), University of Chicago/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) (2009-2010)
• William H. and Frances Green Faculty Fellow, School of Humanities and Sciences (2009-2010)
• William Koren, Jr. Prize (honorable mention), Society for French Historical Studies (2009)
• Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities Grant, Stanford University (2008-2011)
• Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center (2008-2009)
• Walter J. Gores Award, highest award for excellence in teaching, Stanford University (2006)
• Naomi Schor Prize, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association (2003)
• Fulbright Fellowship, Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle (2002-2003)

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

• Member, Advisory Board (2022 - 2023)
• Vice-chair, Faculty senate (2019 - 2020)
• Faculty Senate, Stanford University (2018 - Present)
• Faculty Director, Education as Self-Fashioning (ESF) (2018 - 2019)
• Residential Fellow, Ng Humanities House (2015 - 2017)
• Faculty Director, Humanities + Design research lab, CESTA (2013 - 2020)
• Breadth Governance Board, Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) (2013 - 2017)
• Faculty Senate, Stanford University (2013 - 2015)
• Faculty Advisory Committee, Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies (SPCS) (2012 - 2017)
• Faculty Oversight Committee, Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP) (2012 - 2014)
• Undergraduate Advisory Council (UGAC), Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) (2012 - 2014)
• Selection Committee, Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2012 - 2013)
• Faculty Director, Stanford Summer Humanities Institute (2011 - Present)
• Academic Council Committee on Libraries (C-LIB), Stanford University (2011 - 2014)
• Search Committee (Academic Technology Specialist), Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages (DLCL) (2011 - 2012)
• Search Committee (Digital Humanities), Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages (DLCL) & Department of English (2011 - 2012)
• Steering Committee, Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) Program, Stanford University (2011 - 2012)
• Executive Committee, Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages (DLCL) (2010 - 2019)
• Executive Committee, The Europe Center, FSI/School of H&S (2010 - 2018)
• Chair of undergraduate studies, French, Department of French and Italian (2010 - 2014)
• Chair, Undergraduate Affairs Committee, Division of Literature, Cultures and Languages (DLCL) (2010 - 2014)
• Director of undergraduate studies, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) (2010 - 2014)
• Humanities Curriculum Committee, School of H&S, Stanford University (2010 - 2014)
• Search Committee (Francophonie), Department of French & Italian (2010 - 2011)
• Subcommittee on Breadth, Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) (2010 - 2011)
• Executive Committee, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (2009 - 2014)
• Editor, Republics of Letters (journal) (2008 - 2017)
• Planning and Personnel Committee, Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages (DLCL) (2006 - 2007)
• Steering Committee, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities (2006 - 2007)
• Academic Advisor, Undergraduate Advising Program, Stanford University (2004 - 2006)

Program Affiliations

• Center for Human Rights and International Justice

Professional Education

• Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, French (2004)
• Licence ès Lettres, Université de Genève, French, English, Latin (1999)

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

My current research lies in the fields of intellectual history, political thought, and digital humanities (DH). I recently published a book that explores the history of rights from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Revolutions; I'm currently working on a book that explores the intellectual history of revolution; I have a number of papers on Rousseau's political thought underway; and I continue to work on a number of DH projects.

Projects

• Revolutions in Political Thought

  This book-length project explores how revolution went from being the means toward a constitutional settlement, to becoming an end in and of itself. Stretching from the sixteenth 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 French Historical Studies; another is forthcoming in The Scaffold of Sovereignty, ed. Zvi Ben-Dor, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr (Columbia University Press).

  Location

  France, Russia, Germany

• Digital Humanities

  I'm a PI on the NEH-funded digital humanities project "Mapping the Republic of Letters." This project, which brings together other scholars at Stanford and around the world, aims to map the correspondence and social networks of major intellectual figures. A series of articles based on this project is under review at the American Historical Review; a spin-off article, "The French Enlightenment Network," is forthcoming in the Journal of Modern History (co-written with Maria Comsa, Melanie Conroy, Chloe Edmondson, and Claude Willan). The tool-building part of this project has now been subsumed in the Humanities + Design Research Lab, of which I am the founding faculty director; we received another NEH grant to develop Palladio. This Lab is itself part of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, or CESTA. More recently, I have been working on the project "Writing Rights," and published an article exploring the potential of JSTOR's data portal for exploring the "great unread" of scholarship. I was also the faculty advisor for Stanford's French Revolution Digital Archive (frda.stanford.edu), and collaborate regularly with the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago.

  Location

  Stanford, CA