AUTHOR

Biography of A Dangerous Idea
Who Is Black and Why?
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
Anatomy of Blackness
Sublime Disorder

ANDREW S. CURRAN is a writer and scholar of the eighteenth century whose work explores the intersections of race, science, and Enlightenment thought. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, El Païs, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author or editor of five books.

His most recent book is Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, which is being published by Other Press in February 2026. His last book, Who’s Black and Why? (edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), was nominated for a NAACP image award and won the 2023 Association of American Publishers Award for the best book in European History. Curran is also the author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), which was translated into Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish, and was named one of the best biographies of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, NRC, The Australian, Open Letters Review, The Irish Times, and El Cultural.

Curran is a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques. He lives in Connecticut where he is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.