Andrew Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and a member of Wesleyan University’s Romance Languages and Literatures department. Curran’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Paris Review, El País, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of three books. His most recent book, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), was named one of the best biographies of 2019 by El Cultural, Kirkus Reviews, The Australian, The Irish Times, NRC, and Open Letters Review, and is being translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Chinese. Curran’s previous book was The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment, which was A Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Translated into French as Anatomie de la noirceur at Classiques Garnier, this same book also received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the French l’Académie des sciences d’outre-mer. His new book, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is entitled Who is Black and Why? Race, Enlightenment, and Slavery at the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences, and is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in March 2022. Elected a Fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine in 2010, Curran has also received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He was also the co-winner of the James L. Clifford prize for the best article in eighteenth-century studies in 2011 on the history of albinism. Most recently, Curran received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars award (2016). He was also named a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques in September of 2015. Curran has served on the editorial board of Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture and is presently on the board of Critical Philosophy of Race, Diderot Studies, and Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment.