Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is affiliated with both the French & Italian and Comparative Literature departments. Her teaching and research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals and society; and women writers. Before coming to Stanford in 1995, Professor Boyi taught at universities in the Congo and Burundi, as well as Haverford College and Duke University. She was a Visiting Professor in the French Department of the Graduate Center, CUNY in 1994 and in 1995 a Professeur Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1999-2000 Professor Boyi was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2002-2003 Professor Boyi was the president of the African Literature Association, a non-profit society of scholars dedicated to the advancement of African Literary Studies. She served as a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, where she represents the field of French (2003-2006), and as the Director of the interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford (2005-2008).

Publications

Among Mudimbe-Boyi's publications are Jacques-Stephen Alexis: une écriture poétique, un engagement politique (1992); "Post-Colonial Women Writing in French (1993);"  Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization (2002); Remembering Africa (2002); Essais sur les cultures en contact: Afrique, Amériques, Europe (2006). Her latest book is Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds (2009).

Amir Weiner's research concerns Soviet history with an emphasis on the interaction between totalitarian politics, ideology, nationality, and society. He is the author of Making Sense of War, Landscaping the Human Garden and numerous articles and edited volumes on the impact of World War II on the Soviet polity, the social history of WWII and Soviet frontier politics. His forthcoming book, The KGB: Ruthless Sword, Imperfect Shield, will be published by Yale University Press in 2021. He is currently working on a collective autobiography of KGB officers titled Coffee with the KGB: Conversations with Soviet Security Officers. Professor Weiner has taught courses on modern Russian history; the Second World War; Totalitarianism; War and Society in Modern Europe; Modern Ukrainian History; and History and Memory.

Cécile Alduy works on notions of "nationhood", "identity," on cultural and political constructions and mythologies of "Frenchness" at critical junctures of France's cultural history. Areas of interests include the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric (National Front/Rassemblement national), the relations between cultural, literary and medical discourses on gender and the body in early modern Europe, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema and contemporary French literature, and gender studies. 

Her last book, La Langue de Zemmour was published by Seuil in February 2022 (it was featured in the tv night show Quotidien and L’instant M on France Inter radio among others). 

Her previous book, Ce qu'ils disent vraiment. Les présidentiables pris aux mots (Seuil, 2017), combines digital humanities tools on wide corpora of political discourse with stylistic and rhetorical analysis, narratology, barthesian mythemes, the history of ideas to parse the discursive output and communication strategies of the major presidential candidates of the 2017 election. 

Her book Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) was the first to propose a comprehensive, corpus-based comparative analysis of the discourse, lexicon, mythemes, and ideological tenets of far right leaders Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. 

Cécile Alduy contributes regularly to French, British and American media: she has written a profile of Marine Le Pen for The Atlantic, as well as many investigative, analytical and opinion pieces in Le Monde, Foreign Affairs, Politico, The Nation, The Boston Review, L'Obs, Sciences Humaines, ZAdig, le 1, Le Nouveau Magazine Litéraire, AOC, etc.

She has co-edited with Dominic Thomas and Bruno Cornellier a special issue of the journal "Occasions" on “The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and their Aftermath” that gathers over a dozen essays from French, Canadian, American and English intellectuals from all horizons. 

Her previous book, The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the "Amours" in Renaissance France (1549-1560) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), examines how the poetics of French Petrarchan love collections was exploited by the generation of Ronsard and Du Bellay to promote a nationalist agenda, that of a "Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue" and its cultural supremacy. 

In Renaissance studies, she has published extensively on the works of Marot, Scève, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Louise Labé, La Boétie, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Philippe Jaccottet among others. Her publications also include a revised critical edition of Maurice Scève's Délie (Paris: STFM, 2001) and a comprehensive study of all works written by or on Scève from his lifetime to the present (Maurice Scève. Roma: Memini, 2006). She has served as guest editor of two collected volumes: a special issue of Réforme Humanisme Renaissance entitled "Licences et censures poétiques. La littérature érotique et pornographique vernaculaire à la Renaissance" (vol. 69, 2009); and the proceedings of the 2008 interdisciplinary conference Between Experience and Experiment In The Early Modern World, co-edited with Roland Greene and published in Republic of Letters (2010). 

Prof. Alduy was the Chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages from 2020 to 2023. Previously, she has served as Director of the French and Italian Department (2015-2019), and Director of the Center of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) from 2010 to 2013. 

She is an affiliated scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute as well as a "chercheur associée" at the CEVIPOF, Sciences Po. 

In 2007, Cécile Alduy was awarded the "Médaille de l'ordre des Lettres et des Arts."

Dan Edelstein works primarily on eighteenth-century France, which also serves as a convenient launching pad for raids into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the early modern period. His first book, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), examines how liberal natural right theories, classical republicanism, and the myth of the golden age became fused in eighteenth-century political culture, only to emerge as a violent ideology during the Terror. This book won the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize. He recently published a second book entitled The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), which explores how the idea of an Enlightenment emerged in French academic circles around the 1720's. He is currently working on two book projects: first, on the concept of "counter-mythologies" during the Enlightenment and in the aftermath of the French Revolution; and second, on the "myth of the Revolution."

With J.P. Daughton, Edelstein co-directs theFrench Culture Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, and with Paula Findlen, is a principal investigator for a project called "Mapping the Republic of Letters," which received a three-year Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities grant, and a "Digging into Data" grant from the NEH (read more about the project).He is a founding editor of Republics of Letters, where he also contributes to the Editors' blog.

Edelstein's research was featured in The Europe Center January 2018 Newsletter.

I became interested in Russia at the height of the Cold War and initially studied Russia and Russian with an eye to the foreign service. History lured me way, especially after spending a junior semester at Leningrad State University in 1970 and having the chance to travel around the Soviet Union a bit. In graduate research and since coming to Stanford in 1982, I have focused on the early modern period (from the fourteenth century through the eighteenth). In almost all my work I have been explored the question of how politics worked in an autocracy. Theoretically I am interested in how early modern states, particularly empires, tried to create, at best, social cohesion and, at least, stability, by ritual, ideology, law and the measured use of violence. My early research focused on structures of power at the Kremlin court and the influence of kinship and marriage in politics and on social values from Muscovy to the Enlightenment (Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System 1987); these themes encouraged my abiding interest in the roles of women in political ideology and practice. I have written two books on legal culture, one on disputes over honor (By Honor Bound 1999) and one on the practice of the criminal law (Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia 2012). Here I’ve contrasted the letter of the law with the workings of local courts, how people used the law, how judges and other officials played roles in the system, how the law was written and interpreted. In all this I’ve tried to place Russia in a comparative context where appropriate, trying to break down clichés of Russia being fundamentally different from European history or unknowable.

My current work goes in several directions. One is a turn to the visual -- I have written several articles on the production and use in Russia of icons, frescos and miniatures as a medium for political communication. I am now finishing up a project on images of Russia produced by foreign engravers in early print publications and maps. The tension in these images between stock tropes of the engraver's trade and eye-witness information, is one fascinating aspect; another is the challenge to assess the impact of text and image on the reader. All in all, I have found that most illustrated works about Russia present a more nuanced understanding than the image of “despotism” that has caught a lot of scholarly attention. Finally, I am interested in how Russia functioned as an empire. I recently published a synthetic history (The Russian Empire 1450-1801 2017) of Russia as a “Eurasian politics of different empire,” and I plan to follow up this theme and return to the practice of the law by studying the implementation of Catherine II’s judicial reforms (1775) in the non-Russian provinces.