Sponsor: Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on France and the World
Speaker: Joanna Stalnaker, Columbia University
In this talk, Joanna Stalnaker will draw on her recent book, The Rest Is Silence, along with new archival research into one of the Enlightenment’s most famous salonnières, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand, to question reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment and its legacy. How did Enlightenment philosophers write their end and what lessons do their last works hold for us today?
Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia University. Her most recent book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale 2025), was met with glowing reviews in The Times Literary Supplement and The Wall Street Journal, and has been featured on numerous podcasts, blog posts and interviews. Her first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell 2010), won the Kenshur Prize from the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. At Columbia, Stalnaker was recently awarded the 2026 Division of Humanities in Arts and Sciences Award for Academic Excellence.