Andrew S. Curran

Andrew Curran (Wesleyan University / William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities) is a writer-scholar fascinated by the French eighteenth century. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, and El Pais. He is the editor, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Who is Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter in the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Harvard, 2022), and the author of four books: Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019) The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (2013), and Sublime Disorder, Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe (2001). His latest book is Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson (The Race Makers in its UK edition).