Education

B.A., Yale University
Ph.D., Princeton University

Biography

David L. Sedley is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Among his research and teaching interests: early modern French and English literature; history of aesthetics and intellectual history; relations between literature, philosophy, and the sciences; sublimity, taste, irony, and the rise of the novel; skepticism, probability theory, experimentalism, and the vacuum. His book, Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton, was published in 2005 by The University of Michigan Press. He is currently working on a book about how distinctions between literary and scientific spaces were made in early modern culture. Recent courses taught: Intermediate French; Textes, images, voix (an introduction to French literature); Introduction to Comparative Literature; Approches critiques et théoriques (an introduction to critical theory in French) Crises et identités: la Renaissance; Passions et culture: le grand siècle; L'art du ridicule de Rabelais à Voltaire; L'Invention de la modernité de Montaigne à Rousseau; As the World Turned: Milton and Revolutions of Early Modern Europe; French Senior Conference.