Elena Russo

Elena Russo

Professor of French, Director of Undergraduate Studies, French, Study Abroad Officer, French

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Research Interests: 17th- and 18th-century French literature; cultural and intellectual history of the Enlightenment; religious dissidences; sociability; the history of aesthetics; literary theory

Education: PhD, Princeton University

Modern Languages and Literatures > People > Elena Russo

Elena Russo holds a Licence ès Lettres from the Université de Genève and a PhD from Princeton University. Her interests focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, cultural and intellectual history of the Enlightenment, sociability, the history of aesthetics and criticism. Her books include Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel (1996); La Cour et la ville de la littérature classique aux Lumières (2002) and Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (2007). She is also interested in the seventeenth-century libertines and religious dissidence and has written on Giulio Cesare Vanini and Pierre Bayle. She is currently working on a book on  Diderot’s approach to posterity and the transmission of his complete works.