Pierre Saint-Amand
Francis Wayland Professor, Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature:
French Studies and Comparative Literature
Phone: +1 401 863 3035
Phone 2: +1 401 863 3517
Pierre_Saint-Amand@Brown.EDU
Professor Saint-Amand has research interests in 18th-century literature, especially the libertine novel, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and literary criticism and theory.
Biography
Professor Saint-Amand holds joint appointments with French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A graduate of the University of Montreal, he received his Master's and doctoral degrees in Romance Languages from Johns Hopkins University . Before taking a tenured position at Brown in 1986, he taught as assistant professor of French at Yale and Stanford. In 1991 and 2004 he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard University and in 2001 he taught as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. He is the author of Diderot: Le labyrinthe de la relation (1984); Séduire ou la passion des Lumières (1987); Les Lois de l'hostilité. La politique à l'âge des Lumières (1992); The Libertine's Progress (1994); The Laws of Hostility (1996) and The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment (2011). He is the editor of Diderot; Le Roman au 18e siècle: Postérités; Autonomy in the Age of the Enlightenment. He has edited for Gallimard's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Thérèse philosophe and Confession d'une jeune fille (2000, 2005). He has published widely on topics of literary criticism in journals such as Romanic Review, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, Stanford French Review, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Diderot Studies, Critique, Furor, SubStance, Nouvelle Revue Française, Revue des Sciences Humaines, and Critical Inquiry. He was the recipient in 1986 of a Stanford Humanities Center fellowship, and in 1988 of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. He was named the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Year (1995) and, in 1996, Francis Wayland Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature. He was inducted Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques in February 2001 by the French Government.
Interests
Pierre Saint-Amand has completed a book on idleness in the literature of the eighteenth-century in France. The book deals first with the repression of idleness in a century that saw the rise of capitalism. In that context, it studies the oppositional forms of leisure that appear in the works of Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and, at the end of the century, Joseph Joubert.
A new project is a collection of articles on libertine literature of the eighteenth-century on authors as diverse as Prevost, Godard d'Aucour, Boyer d'Argens and Pidansat de Mairobert.
Degrees
Ph. D., The Johns Hopkins University
Awards
Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center, 1985-86
Guggenheim Fellow, 1988
Fellow, Institute of European Studies, Paris and Nantes, 1989
Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of the Year, 1995
Fellow, East-West Seminar, International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Berlin, 1997
Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, 2001
Clifford Lecture, ASECS, 2004
Lectureship Committee, Brown University, Grant for Colloquium "Who Cares for Lacan," 1988
Lectureship Committee, Brown University, Grant for Colloquium "New Thoughts from France," 1993
Lectureship Committee, Grant (with Karen Newman) for Colloquium "Conduct and Civilité," 1996
Lectureship Committee, Brown University, Grant for Colloquium "Racism Made in France," 2000
Lectureship Committee, Brown University, Grant for Colloquium "The French-American Differend," 2004-2005
Choice Oustanding Academic Title, 2012 for The Pursuit of Laziness
Lectureship Committee, Brown University, Grant for Colloquium, "Diderot's Time: Changing the Enlightenment", 2013
Affiliations
Editorial Board, Stanford French Review, 1982-1986
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)
Nomination Committee, 1994-95, Clifford Prize Committee, 2001-02, Search Committee for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2004
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Executive Committee, Division on Comparative Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature, 1998-2002, Delegate to General Assembly, 1998-2000, Selection Committee for Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, 2003-2005, Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures, 2003; PMLA Editorial Board, 2004-2006; Executive Committee, Division of Eighteenth-Century French Literature, 2012-
Teaching
Pierre Saint-Amand teaches the literature and the culture of eighteenth century France. His courses have included topics as varied as the family, the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette, Paris, the libertine novel, the theater, and introduction to the major philosophers of the French Enlightenment. He also teaches a course on contemporary French society.
Funded Research
Stanford Humanities Center, 1985-86
Institute of European Studies, Paris and Nantes, June 1989
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Jan-Dec 1989, $24,000
East West Seminar, International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Berlin, July 1997
Office of Vice President for Research, Brown University, 2004, $1,000; 2007-08, $1,800; 2008-09, $1,000; 2010-11, $1,062
Web Links
Curriculum Vitae
Download Pierre Saint-Amand's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format
