Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson by Andrew S. Curran

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment natural historians and classifiers redefined what it meant to be human. By 1800, they had recast the very idea of humankind, sorting the world’s peoples into rigid biological categories for the first time in history. Prize-winning biographer Andrew S. Curran retraces this often-misunderstood story by plunging into the lives and ideas of the most influential individuals behind this reconceptualization, among them Louis XIV, Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, Biography of a Dangerous Idea not only reveals the Enlightenment’s entanglement with empire and oppression—it offers a bold reassessment of the era’s most celebrated luminaries.

About the Speaker

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. A scholar and biographer, his writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, TIME, the Paris Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author or editor of five books. His most recent, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Who’s Black and Why? His previous book was the prize-winning biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019).

Tina Montenegro is an Assistant Professor of French Literature at Boston College, specializing in Medieval Studies. Widely published in both medieval literature and art, her research explores the reception of classical rhetoric, intellectual history, and literary and art theory. She is currently finalizing her book manuscript, The Place of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, which examines civic poetry of the late Middle Ages through the reception in France of Brunetto Latini’s thirteenth-century Tresor. Among other courses, she teaches “Fight Like the French”, in which she and her students explore the historical French passion for interrogation and debate.