Voltaire Foundation

Voltaire Foundation Annual Digital Enlightenment Studies Lecture: Ruth Ahnert on Unmasking Aliases: A New Way to Find Hidden Identities in the Tudor State Papers This paper will introduce a new network-based method for identifying aliases in early modern correspondence. Espionage and conspiracy alike relied upon proliferating pseudonyms, shared personae, and carefully segmented channels of communi...

Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies: Mikko Tolonen on Books as Objects, Data and Meaning: A Computational Approach to Eighteenth-Century Book and Intellectual History In this lecture, I will present a framework developed by the Helsinki Computational History Group and implemented together with its partners for investigating eighteenth-century book and intellectual h...

The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive First Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies Glenn Roe (Sorbonne University & University of Oxford) The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive

Professor Richard Bourke delivers the 2023 Annual Besterman Lecture. Hegel described philosophy as its own time comprehended in thought. For him, that meant understanding the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Examining what the Enlightenment meant for Hegel involves separating its generic meaning as an historical process from its specific sense as a determinate period and its still narrower signifi...

Professor Lorraine Daston delivers the 2019 Besterman Lecture By the late seventeenth century, Western Europe’s metropolises were in competition with each other to straighten, illuminate, sanitize, broaden, and above all order their thoroughfares, granting the police enormous power. After the creation of the office of the Paris Lieutenant de Police in 1667, the Parisian police became the avant gar...

Keith M Baker, professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University, explains a Digital Humanities project mapping the debates on the constituent articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. What happened to rights in 1789? I plan to present in this lecture some results of a collaborative research project exploring this question. Digital Humanities has don...

Martin van Gelderen delivers a talk for the Besterman Lecture 2018

Willard McCarty, King's College, London, gives the 2017 Besterman lecture. If the digital computer is to be a 'machine for doing thinking' in the arts and letters, rather than merely a way of automating tasks we already know how to perform, then its constraints and the powers these constraints define need to be understood. This lecture explores those constraints and powers across the three stages...

A highly critical account of Adam Smith's views on famine, which fail to recognize that you can have starvation in the midst of plenty.

Short podcast looking at Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert, housed in the Bodleian Library.

Professor Nathalie Ferrand (École Normale Supérieure Paris) gives the 2012 Besterman Lecture for the Voltaire Foundation. This lecture is in French.