Andrew Curran (Ph.D., New York University, 1996) is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and a member of Wesleyan University’s Romance Languages and Literatures department.

For the first part of his career, Curran’s research focused on the eighteenth-century life sciences and medicine.

His major publications include an edited volume (Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought in Eighteenth-Century Life) and two books: Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 2001) and, more recently, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011 / paper 2013).

The Anatomy of Blackness recently appeared in French translation (Anatomie de la noirceur) at Classiques Garnier.

He recently completed an intellectual biography of Denis Diderot for Other Press that will appear in January of 2019. This book is entitled Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. 

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 (declined), 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 and Diderot Studies.