Online Enlightenment Club

Alexandre Mendes Cunha is Associate Professor of Economics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where he holds a Jean Monnet Chair funded by the European Commission. He specializes in the history of economic thought and intellectual history, studying the international diffusion of economic ideas in different historical contexts, with a focus on eighteenth-century Enlightenment studies and interwar Europe. 

Simon Davies is a retired Professor of Enlightenment Studies at the Queens’s University of Belfast where he was also the founding Director of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. His principal research area is in French studies, particularly the period 1759 to 1789. In this, his focus is primarily on the use of theatre, fiction, poetry in the dissemination of ‘philosophical’ ideas. He contributed dozens of editions of texts by Voltaire to his Complete Works (Voltaire Foundation) and was a member of its editorial board for more than twenty years. He is still heavily engaged in the first scholarly editions of the correspondence and works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. He has served on several academic committees – Secretary General of the International Society for Eighteenth-century Studies; President of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society; Treasurer of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He remains the correspondent of the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the UK.

I study history and German literature at the Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. During my doctoral studies, focusing on the outcomes and aftermath of the implementation of health reforms introduced by Maria Theresa and Joseph II as perceived through the example of midwives in the Kingdom of Hungary. I defended my doctoral thesis in 2001. Relying on the results of my thesis as well as extending its period, field, and thematic framework, including the scope of research into available sources, a further elaboration of the historical changes affecting the building up of contemporary authoritative knowledge of birth in Hungary between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries was published together with an ethnographer colleague in two volumes in 2005 and 2023.

In the course of my research during the past decade, I mainly concentrated on the aspects and patterns of the cultures of medical knowledge in the eighteenth–century Habsburg Monarchy, including the practices of knowledge management, epistemology, and the circulation of scientific knowledge. I have meant to explore and present cross–disciplinary tendencies in relation to historical phenomena, discourses, personal and material conditions combining thematic registers and methodology applied in the field of humanities.

In the course of my research career, I have been granted several scholarships since 1997 (Friedrich Schiller Universität, Jena; Karl Ruprecht Universität, Heidelberg; Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; Max–Planck Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen; Institut für Geschichte der Medizin in Josephinum, Vienna; Archivio di Stato die Firenze, Florence; Maison Sciences des l’Homme, Paris). I obtained my habilitation degree in 2016 and currently hold the position of associate professor at the Department of Early Modern History, Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest.

"Raconter par la/les biographie(s)”. Presentation at a conference organized in memory of Éva H. Balázs, May 2006, University Library of Eötvös Loránd University Budapest.

I study history and English literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. As of the winter term of 1989, I spent four terms as an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, SSEES, University of London (today UCL). I was primarily engaged in exploring, identifying, compiling, and publishing an analytical guide to manuscript sources held in UK archives and repositories relating to the Kingdom of Hungary. In the course of my tenure in London, I was awarded a senior research scholarship of the Herzog August Bibliothek of Wolfenbüttel, Germany, where I spent three months at the end of 1990 carrying out research into late eighteenth-century German farming literature, as well as into the influence of the Georgia Augusta, on the circulation of scientific knowledge in contemporary Hungary. 

My articles and papers have been published in foreign and Hungarian journals, academic periodicals. My book entitled Guide to Documents and Manuscripts in Great Britain Relating to the Kingdom of Hungary from the Earliest Times to 1800 (London–New York: Mansell, 1992.) was selected and rewarded by the British Library Association as an outstanding reference book of the year (Besterman Prize, Very Highly Commended, 1992). I have published a monograph on Count György Festetics, the founder of Hungary’s first agricultural college, and another book on  technological journeys undertaken by Hungarian agriculturists in Western Europe in the early 1820s. 

I am currently Head of the Institute of History at the Faculty of Humanities, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary (KRE), Budapest.

Anthony La Vopais professor emeritus of History at North Carolina State University. Eminent scholar of the Enlightenment, his work brings ideas and society together. The question "What creates meaning and what is meaning" has accompanied him throughout his life. How does social origin come into play, what is the role of the Ego, in which regard was the Enlightenment discourse gendered? His major publications Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany - Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799 - The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures provide answers.

Adriana Luna-Fabritius is a scholar specialising in early-modern languages of republicanism, natural law, and political economy within the Spanish monarchy. Her research focuses on the transformation of Spanish imperialism through scientific, legal, and political practices across the communication networks of the Atlantic monarchy, with a special focus on Naples, the Crown of Aragon, and New Spain.

She has published works on the use of natural law for transforming self-government practices of the cities, improving justice delivery, establishing the rule of law and constitutionalising of rights, political oeconomy and the emergence of labour laws, republicanism, love of country and patriotism, the social history of the body and early modern discussions on women’s equality.

Currently she’s working on her project “Narratives of Crisis” which examines how crisis shaped early modern political philosophies. 

Jonathan Sheehan is professor of early modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. His work concerns broadly the histories of religion, scholarship, and science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is coauthor, with Dror Wahrman, of Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2015). His previous book, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), won the George Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His articles have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Journal of Modern History, Representations, Prooftexts, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and Past and Present. His new book, Sacrifice: Christianity and Its Afterlives, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2025. 

I got my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1999. After that, I spent some time at M.I.T.’s Dibner Institute for the History of Science (may it rest in peace), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, before landing in southern California at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. I’ve published about German cameralists, G.W. Leibniz, Disneyish anachronism, mining and fires, among other things. I also teach about everything from world soccer and deep time to police states and propaganda. And I have a Corgi named Heidi.