The Race Makers: from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson – A Biographical History of the Most Dangerous Idea Ever Invented 

Andrew S. Curran

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Andrew Curran’s forthcoming book, The Race Makers, is a group biography that traces the development of the concept of race in the eighteenth century. Among its “characters” are Louis XIV, François Bernier, Buffon, Voltaire, Carl Linnaeus, David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Immanuel Kant, J.F. Blumenbach, and Thomas Jefferson. In this talk, Curran will explore how biography offers a fresh perspective on both the intellectual landscape and the legacy of the Enlightenment era.

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. A scholar and biographer, 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., is Who is Black and Why? His previous book was the prize-winning biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.