Philippe Desan
Howard L. Willett Professor of French and History of Culture
Office: Wieboldt 410
p-desan@uchicago.edu
Professor Desan has been at the University of Chicago since 1984. Educated in France (Political Economy and Sociology) and in the United States (Literary Studies), his scholarship mostly includes works on the French Renaissance in relation to their economic, political and sociological context. He also works on nineteenth-century literature, especially Flaubert, from a sociological perspective.
Professor Desan is the general editor of the Montaigne Studies journal and directs the Chicago Renaissance Center. His books include Naissance de la méthode (1987), Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance (1991), Les Commerces de Montaigne (1992), Penser l'histoire à la Renaissance (1993), Montaigne dans tous ses états (2001), L'Imaginaire économique de la Renaissance (2002), Portraits à l'essai: iconographie de Montaigne (2007), and Montaigne. Les formes du monde et de l'esprit (2008). He has also edited numerous texts of the sixteenth century - including the first color reproduction of Montaigne's Bordeaux Copy of the Essais (2002). He served as the general editor of the Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 2004, 2007). He is currently working on a biography of Montaigne titled Montaigne: Essais en politique and pursuing his long-term research on the history of pre-modern economic thought in Europe.
Education
- PhD in French, University of California, Davis, 1984
- DEA Economie et Société, Université de Paris VIII, June 1979
- MA in English, Université de Paris VIII, October 1978
- Licence in Political Economy, Université de Paris VIII, June 1978
Awards, Honors, and Professional Experience
- Prix de l'Académie Française (for the Dictionnaire de Montaigne), 2005
- Ordre National du Mérite, given by the French government (for his recent edition of the Bordeaux copy of Montaigne's Essais), 2004
- Médaille de Montaigne, given by the Université de Bordeaux (for work on Montaigne), 1995
- Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, 1994
- Médaille de la ville de Bordeaux, in commemoration of the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of Montaigne (for work on Montaigne), 1992
- American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1989-1990
- Has taught at the École Nationale des Chartes (Paris), the Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours), the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris) and Harvard University
Selected Courses Taught
- Montaigne
- Rabelais
- La Pléiade
- Flaubert
- Ecrire l'histoire à la Renaissance
- Pro seminar in History of Culture
- Ideology and Culture
- Variety of undergraduate courses in French and the Common Core in the College
- Director of the Common Core Civilization sequence taught in Paris