Join Prof. Andrew Curran, the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University, for a discussion related to his forthcoming book, The Race Makers, the first biography-driven history of the invention of race. In this talk, Curran will discuss the different methods that both he and scholars have used to discuss the theologians, travel writers, climate theorists, anatomists, skull-measuring quacks, classifiers, ship captains, planters, and government officials who utterly transformed the notion of the human species and its peoples during the Enlightenment period.

Please note: Earlier on November 10, Prof. Curran will join the French Department's own Prof. Philippe Roger for a conversation on "The Art of Thinking Freely" (on Diderot and Democracy). This event will be hosted by the Karsh Institute of Democracy as part of their Touchstones of Democracy series. 12-1:15PM in Bond House. If interested, please reserve a spot here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-art-of-thinking-freely-tickets-704726785787?aff=oddtdtcreator

ANDREW S. CURRAN is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. A writer-scholar fascinated by the eighteenth century, his writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, El Païs, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author or editor of five books. His most recent, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for Harvard University Press, is Who is Black and Why?. This book, on the subject of a forgotten contest on the supposed “causes” of blackness organized by the Bordeaux Academy of Science in 1739, was nominated for a NAACP image award and won the 2023 Association of American Publishers Award for the best book in European History. Curran is also the author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), which was translated into Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish, and was named one of the best biographies of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, NRC, The Australian, Open Letters Review, The Irish Times, and El Cultural. His previous book was The Anatomy of Blackness, which received the Marin Prize from the Académie des sciences d’outre-mer. Curran is a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques.