Montesquieu’s Persian Letters at 300

Timothy Brennan

Timothy Brennan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin. His articles on Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Jefferson have appeared in History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, The European Legacy, and The Journal of Politics.

Hank Clark

Hank Clark is senior lecturer and program director of the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France and, most recently, Dartmouth and the World: Religion and Political Economy circa 1769. His edition of Montesquieu’s Pensees won the Wilson Prize for best scholarly index in North America and was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 by Choice magazine. He is completing a book tentatively entitled The Moral Economy We Have Lost: Rethinking the Pre-Industrial World.

Pauline Kra

Pauline Kra is Professor emerita of French at Yeshiva University and Senior programmer analyst at Columbia. Author of articles on Montesquieu, Voltaire and
La Bruyère.

Vickie Sullivan

Vickie Sullivan is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science and teaches and studies political thought and philosophy. She also maintains teaching and research interests in politics and literature. Her most recent book is Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. Her articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, Political Theory, Polity, and Review of Politics. Her current project is tentatively entitled "Modern Empires, Political and Philosophical."

Stuart D. Warner

Stuart D. Warner is Professor of Philosophy and Founding Director of the Montesquieu Forum at Roosevelt University. His doctoral dissertation was on Law and Social Order in Lon L. Fuller and F.A. Hayek. He has published essays on Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu. His last two books were a bilingual edition of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims and an edition of Montesquieu's Persian Letters. Currently, he is working on new editions of Descartes's Discourse on Method and Bacon's New Atlantis (with Svetozar Minkov), as well as a monograph on Montesquieu's Menagerie: Reading Persian Letters.

Ourida Mostefai

Ourida Mostefai holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French Studies at Brown University where she directs the French Center of Excellence. She is the author of two books on Rousseau: Le Citoyen de Genève et la République des Lettres (2003) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique (2016) as well as numerous articles on the French Enlightenment. She has co-edited Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit, and the Unspoken in Rousseau (2020); Rousseau and l’Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment (2009) and Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s “Confessions” and “Rêveries” (2003) and has edited Lectures de la Nouvelle Héloïse (1993). She was also a faculty member at Boston College in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures from 1988 to 2014.

She serves on the Editorial Boards of Eighteenth-Century Studies and of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and is the past President of the Rousseau Association.