Who gets to decide what we make of our lives, and on what authority?

Andrew S. Curran has spent twenty-five years exploring how race, science, religion, and the pursuit of knowledge became entangled during the Enlightenment—and who had the authority to define and justify those ideas. A historian and biographer fascinated by the eighteenth century, he is the author or editor of seven books, most recently Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson (published in the UK as The Race Makers). His previous book, Who’s Black and Why?, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., won the 2023 Association of American Publishers Prose Award for Best Book in European History and was nominated for a NAACP Image Award. His biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely was named a best biography of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, The Irish Times, El Cultural, The Australian, The Independent, NRC, O Globo, and Open Letters Review; it was also a finalist for the Paris-American Library Book Prize and the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. The book has been translated into five languages. His new project, co-authored with Dennis Rasmussen, is Good Beyond Belief. Curran’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, The Paris Review, and The Wall Street Journal. He 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.