Historical painting of aristocacy in the park

Online Enlightenment Club

The Online Enlightenment Club is an interdisciplinary reading group for anyone interested in the ideas, culture, and history of Europe in the long eighteenth century. We discuss cutting-edge work across the field of Enlightenment Studies, broadly construed, including work which engages with the Enlightenment from a more global perspective.

We invite speakers across all career stages – the already famous and the ones on their way. Past speakers have had backgrounds in history, philosophy, economics, political science, art history, and cultural and literary studies. People from all branches of scholarship are encouraged to join. The format: we pre-circulate a text from a guest author, read it in the week before the session, and come together as a group to discuss it with its author. To get a sense of what’s on offer, have a look at our previous programs!

We are proud to be the only international, non-institutional club worldwide that discusses Enlightenment Studies.

We hope to merge quality with interest.

Interested in the Enlightenment? We meet online every second week – see our current program – on Thursdays at 18:00-20:00 CET. You can find us here.

Welcome!

Image: Snow Minister CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Winter Term 2026

All sessions take place via BigBlueButton from 17:30 to c. 19:00 (CET)

22 Oct	Heikki Lempa Moravian University	The Exercises of the Others: The German Discovery of Zurkhaneh in the Late Eighteenth Century
5 Nov	Jonathan Sheehan University of California, Berkeley	The Heteronomy of the Secular: Sacrifice and the European Sciences of Man
19 Nov	Andrew Curran Wesleyan University	Voltaire: The Philosophe Who Made Racism Drôle
3 Dec	Avi Lifschitz University of Oxford	Authorship as Royal Accountability? Frederick II’s Writings and the Prussian Public Sphere

Joining information and papers for discussion will be sent out one week before each session. Please email Martin Gierl (mgierl1@gwdg.de) to join the mailing list or with any queries.

TEACHING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The future of Enlightenment studies lies as much in our teaching as in our research. Effective teaching of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the wider public, shapes public perceptions of the field, and in turn is influential in shaping funding and hiring decisions taken by public bodies. We have therefore decided to innovate and include in our programme a discussion space on this topic, where participants can come together and exchange experiences, techniques and objectives around teaching the Enlightenment. Please join us at the BBB on Thursday May 7 at 5pm BST, 6pm CET, noon EST. The session will last for two hours. There will be introductory remarks by Dorinda Outram, and Jonas Gerlings will moderate. If there is sufficient interest, another seminar on teaching could be planned for a later date.

As suggestions for focussing debate, we suggest themes such as:

A student project ‘The Enlightenment in 100 Objects’

The role of the text-book

Teaching students to read/ to read documents

Arousing interest and evoking debate in the undergraduate class

Digital resources

Fund-raising for graduate seminars

AI problems, AI contributions

A global Enlightenment?

Public-facing teaching.

Organizers

Jonas Gerlings is an intellectual historian specialising in the long eighteenth century. He has a particular interest in the Baltic Sea region and its global context. After defending his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in 2017, he held positions at the University of Copenhagen (2016–2017) and the University of Göttingen (2021–2024). He has also been a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh, Uppsala University, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Studies and the Danish Academy in Rome. From 2022 to 2023, he was a visiting senior research associate at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. His research has been supported by grants from Horizon Europe (Marie Curie Global Fellow) and the Danish Council for Independent Research (Mobilex). He has published work in various fields within Enlightenment studies, ranging from natural history and earth science to political economy and forensic psychiatry. He is currently working on notions of race and Blackness, as well as political theories of abolitionism in the long eighteenth century.

Martin Gierl is a university lecturer in church history at the University of Göttingen. His field of research is the history of knowledge and media during the Enlightenment. He is currently analyzing the development of academic journals at the University of Göttingen. He received his doctorate in 1995 with a thesis on Pietism and the Enlightenment. In 2002, he habilitated with a thesis on the organization of science academies in the late 19th century. In 2012, he published a monograph on the Göttingen historian Johann Christoph Gatterer. His recent book Die Publikationsprofile Göttinger Professoren von 1760 bis 1830 und die Organization der Wissenschaft was published in 2025. It’s open access.

Martin Gierl's Introduction

Ere Nokkala is an Associate Professor in History of Social and Economic Thought at the University of Jyväskylä. His main research interests are in aspects of the early modern history of political economy, natural law, law of nations, the freedom of the press and republicanism. Nokkala earned his Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence in 2010. He is the PI of the ERC Project “De-Centering Eighteenth-Century Political Economy: Rethinking Growth, Wealth, and Welfare in the Swedish Empire”.

Ere Nokkala

I was educated at Cambridge, and was granted a Ph.D in History in 1974. I have worked on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, the history of science, and the history of exploration and cultural contact in the eighteenth century. The history of the body and of political culture are an enduring fascination. I am also interested in historiography, literature and the nature of history writing. Satire, humour and foolishness as historical actors were the subject of my last book (2019), ‘Four Fools in the Age of Reason: Laughter, Cruelty and Power in Early Modern Germany’. Other books include ‘The Body and the French Revolution’ (1989, reprinted 2023); ‘The Enlightenment’ (fifth edition, 2019); ‘ Panorama of the Enlightenment ‘ (2006) ‘ Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France: Georges Cuvier’ (1984, reprinted 2023), and (with P. Abir-Am) ‘Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789- 1979’. (1987). I am currently working on patronage in the early modern period, and with an experiment in autobiography. Selected papers are collected in ‘Science, Enlightenment and Revolution: Selected Papers, 1976-2019 (2023). Much of my work has been translated into Japanese, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Rumanian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish. I am a believer in the critical power of Enlightenment.

Most recent publications: 'Entering the Whirlpool: A Life in History' (2025); 'Not Amused by the Enlightenment': JCD Clark, The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History. Intellectual History Review, 2025, pp. 359–366.

Members

Online Enlightenment Club Group member collage

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.

Alexandre Mendes Cunha who has short black hair. He is wearing a light blue shirt.

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.

Lilla Krász who has black hair. She is giving a speech.

"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.

György Kurucz who has short gray hair. He is wearing a suite and red tie.

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.

Adriana Luna-Fabritius who has dark brown hair.

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.

Online Enlightenment Club portrait Jonathan Sheehan

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.

Andre Wakefield on a shore, he has short light hair and dark gray shirt.

Previous Events

Take a look at the past events of the club.

16 April	Sebastian Kühn Berlin	Decentering Science in the Enlightenment
30 April	Pärtel Piirimäe Tarto	Freedom as a Human Right: J. G. Eisen‘s Concept of Freedom in the Context of the St. Petersburg Free Economic Society‘s 1766 Prize Essays
14 May	Elena Korchmina Bologna	Enlightenment Philosophy and Gender: European Ideas on Women's Economic Roles
28 May	Dorinda Outram	Unfreedom, Property and Labour: Slavery and Serfdom in the Enlightenment
11 June	Mark Berry London	Clemency, Rebellion, and the House of Austria: Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito and the Bohemian Coronation of 1791
25 June	Bill Bell Cardiff	Venus in the Stocks: The Humble Representation of the Unspeakable Mr. Curll
9 July	Martin Urmann Berlin	The Prize Contests of the French Academies as Media of Knowledge Reflection
23 July	Gunvor Simonsen Copenhagen	Fugitives in Dominica: Mountain Refuge, Enslaved Mobility, and Imperial Sanctuary in the 1820s

6 Nov	Stefan Droste Göttingen	Failing Projectors as Experts in 18th century Military Technology
20 Nov	Agnes Gehbald Bern	Beyond Voltaire: A Community of Readers across the Atlantic
4 Dec	Gabriel Darriulat Paris	Grégoire’s Transnational Network and Haiti’s Place on the International Stage
18 Dec	John Coffey Leicester	Enlightenment and Religion Revisited: Progress and Eschatology in the British Antislavery Movement
8 Jan	Marian Füssel Göttingen	Between Art and Science: Reshaping Theory and Practice in the Military Enlightenment
22 Jan	Ella Viitaniemi Tampere	A man without bread – Precarious clergy and struggling career paths
5 Feb	Thomas Biskup Wolfenbüttel	Lessing and the public sphere: authorship, censorship and patronage in Enlightenment Germany

24 April	Johannes Ljungberg (Linköping)	Sabbath Crimes in a City of Enlightenment: Religious and Commercial (Dis)order in Eighteenth-Century Altona
8 May	Caroline Gleason-Mercier (Turin)	Melodies, Maternités, and Milk: Lucile Gretry's Le mariage d'Antonio (1782)
22 May	Emily Erikson (Yale)	Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought
5 June	Angus Harwood Brown (Chicago)	On the Hidden Constitution: The Fear of Oligarchy in the French Critique of Checks and Balances
19 June	Giovanni Lista (Halle)	“Eine Neigung vor die neuere Gelehrsamkeit”: Gottsched translating Fontenelle’s Entretiens(1726-1751)
3 July	Jonas Gerlings (Rome)	The Abolitionist Moment in German Thought from Kant to Hegel
17 July	Cindy Ermus (Nebraska-Lincoln)	The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
31 July	Avi Lifschitz (Oxford)	Limits of Enlightenment: Frederick II and the philosophes on the Common People
14 August	Megan Gallagher (Alabama)	Against Liberal Individualism (As a Standard for Consent)

3 Oct	Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen)	Reinhart Koselleck's Enlightenment
17 Oct	Morgan Golf-French (Turin)	Emotions, Enlightenment, and the Abolition of Slavery in German Thought, c. 1778–1794
31 Oct	Charlotta Wolff (Turku)	Sexual Tolerance and Enlightened Sociability
14 Nov	Keith Tribe (Jyväskylä)	Commerce, économie politique and Polizei in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
28 Nov	Johan van der Zande (Berkeley)	What was Popular Philosophy?
12 Dec	Rebecca Cypess (Yeshiva)	Playing Proverbs with Madame Genlis
9 Jan	Stefanie Buchenau (Paris)	Kant on the Earth
23 Jan	Kris Palmieri (Halle-Wittenberg)	Grand Visions of Alterthumswissenschaft: Classical Philology and German Intellectual Culture
6 Feb	Elias Buchetmann (Rostock)	Female Manners and Social Criticism between Britain and Germany: Forkel, Carlisle, and Wollstonecraft

2 May - Lucile Boucher (EUI, Florence), "Obsolete Pasts? Globalization as an analytical prism in Vincenzo Formaeloni’s History of the Black Sea (1788-1789)"
16 May - Cathleen Mair (QMUL, London), "Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Staël as Interpreters of Jacques Necker’s Opinions religieuses (1788)"
30 May - Ross Moncrieff (All Souls, Oxford), "Confucianism and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain"
13 June - Jonathan Sheehan (UC Berkeley), "Theology, Anthropology, and the Sacrifices of Enlightenment"
27 June - Béla Kapossy (University of Lausanne), "The Restoration of Political Science"
11 July Martin Gierl (University of Göttingen), "History, Organization, and Technology— Enlightenment as Organization of Organization"

Beginning on January 12 we will meet via BigBlueButton on Thursdays every two weeks at 16:00 (CET)/15:00 (GMT)/10:00 (EST). The programme for the coming sessions is

12 January - Richard Whatmore (St. Andrews) "How the Second Enlightenment Failed"
26 January - Olga Lenczewska (UNCW) "Kant on Moral Education and the Origins of Humanity"
9 February - Jacob Chatterjee (Oxford) "Bernard Mandeville’s Critique of Epicurus and the ‘easie Divines’ of the Church of England, 1705-1732"
23 February - Jonas Nordin (Lund) "Freedom of the Press and Political Radicalism in Late Eighteenth-Century Sweden"
9 March - Maria Zukovs (St. Andrews) "France and the French Revolution in the Dublin Press, 1788-1794"
23 March - Håkon Evju (Oslo) "Contesting the Ancient North: The late Eighteenth-Century Historical Rivalry between August Ludwig Schlözer and Gerhard Schøning"
6 April - Suzanne Kooloos (Amsterdam) "'Paper, Bubble, and Wind Trade': Economies of Theatre in the Dutch Republic and The Great Mirror of Folly (1720)"
20 April - Gabriela Goldin (IIH-UNAM) "The Mexican Enlightenment"

21 April - Ed Jones Corredera (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg), "The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation (2021), ch. 2: ‘Predicting War and Peace’"
5 May - Nicholas B. Miller (Flagler College and Universität zu Köln) "John Millar and Sociology: A New Reception History"
19 May - Eva Piirimäe (University of Tartu) "Herder and Enlightenment Politics: Patriotism, Commerce and Peace" (forthcoming), Introduction
2 June - Ingrid Schreiber (Oxford): "Against Arendt: Egoism and Intellectual Sociability in the Kantian Public Sphere"
16 June - Matthijs Lok (Amsterdam) “The Making of Historical Europeanism: Counter-Revolution, Enlightenment and the Politics of the Past”
30 June - Pernille Røge (Pittsburgh): "A Gateway to Empire: Foreigners and Foreign Capital in the Danish West Indies, c. 1750-1815"
14 July - Sarah R. Cohen (Albani): “Artistic Matter and Philosophies of Knowledge: The Case of the Sensory Animal”

4 November - Dorinda Outram & Tony LaVopa Patronage
18 November - Devin Vartija (Utrecht): “De Felice's Encyclopédie d'Yverdon: Expanding and Contesting Human Science”
2 December - Michelle Pfeffer (Oxford): "William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1738-41) and Theological Learning in the Public Sphere"
16 December - Benedek Varga (Cambridge): "From Pennsylvania to Transylvania: August Ludwig Schlözer and the decentering of Enlightenment”
13 January - Anton Matytsin (Florida): "Comparative Chronology and Universal History at the Académie des inscriptions"
27 January - Maria Florutau (Oxford): "Late Leibnizianism in the Berlin Academy and its tipping point: the 1779 Speculative Class contest”
10 February - Christy Pichichero (Washington): “Talking B(l)ack: Theorizing Race and its Intersections in Critical Eighteenth-Century Studies”

5. November - Kelly Whitmer (Lichtenberg-Kolleg / Sewanee College) "Useful Science, Youth and the Pedagogies of Information in the Early Modern World"
19. November - Arthur Kuhle (Universität Göttingen) "Concepts of Social Sustainability"
3. December - Shiru Lim (Lichtenberg-Kolleg) Recent Research
17. December - Charlotte Backerra (Universität Göttingen) "Source Criticism in Cultural History"
14 January - Felicia Gottmann (University of Northumbria) "The Prussian East India Companies"
28 January - Marian Füssel (Universität Göttingen) "Wissensgeschichte"
11 February - Michael Bycroft (University of Warwick) and Alexander Wragge-Morley (Lancaster University) "'Science and Connoisseurship in the Long Eighteenth Century"
25 February - Soile Ylivuori (University of Helsinki) "Nationality and Race in Georgian England and its Colonies"

22 April - Ritchie Robertson (Oxford) "Science and Sensibility. The Enlightenment. The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790, chapter"
6. May - Alexandre Mendes Cunha (University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte) "A ‘Swiss connection’ in the dissemination of cameralist ideas during the second half of the 18th century"
20 May - Signy Gutnick Allen (London School of Economics) "Nature, Artifice and the End of Government: Mary Wollstonecraft’s An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794)"
3 June - Annika Raapke (Göttingen) "Petites Affaires. Pacotille Economies in the Ancien Régime"
17 June - David Bete & Philip Knäble (Göttingen) "The Jesuit Mission and the Idea of Economic Growth"
1 July - Junko Takeda (Syracuse University, New York State) "Jean-François, the Other Rousseau: The Consul of Baghdad and the Franco-Persian Revolution in India"
15 July - Felix Waldmann (Cambridge) "Giambattista Vico, Eugene of Savoy and Hugo Grotius'sDe jure belli ac pacis, 1719"

Former Organizers

Morgan Golf-French

Ingrid Schreiber

Online Enlightenment Club

Winter Term 2026

Enlightenment Teaching Seminar

Organizers

Jonas Gerlings

Martin Gierl

Ere Nokkala

Dorinda Outram

Members

Alexandre Mendes Cunha

Simon Davies

Lilla Krász

György Kurucz

Anthony La Vopa

Adriana Luna-Fabritius

Jonathan Sheehan

Andre Wakefield

Previous Events

Spring/Summer Term 2026

Autumn/Winter Term 2025/2026

Spring/Summer Term 2025

Winter Term 2024/2025

Summer Term 2024

Winter Term 2022 / 2023

Summer Term 2022

Winter Term 2021 / 2022

Winter Term 2020 / 2021

Summer Term 2021

Former Organizers