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Andrew Curran - Before Anthropology: Enlightenment "Science" and the Category of the Human

Wesleyan professor Andrew Curran will be looking back at an era before the term "anthropology" was used as it is today. The talk will include discussions on natural historians, the birth of racial classification, anatomical theories, and the status of enlightenment.

Andrew Curran is professor of French and dean of the Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. He has published a number of articles on topics related to scientific academy debates, the representation of Africa in eighteenth-century thought, the history of anthropology, and Denis Diderot. He is the author of two books: Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe (Voltaire Foundation: University of Oxford, 2001) and The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, 2013). He also edited a collection of essays, Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought, for Eighteenth-Century Life. Curran has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Curran was also elected a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine in 2010 and was co-winner of the Clifford Prize in 2011. He is currently writing a new biography on Diderot that is tentatively entitled: Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely.

Location on campus: Marjorie Leff Miller ‘53 Lecture Hall (formerly Titsworth Lecture Hall)

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