Dan Edelstein joined the Stanford French & Italian Department in July 2004. He received his Ph.D. in May 2004 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a dissertation on mythology and mythography in the French Enlightenment and their role during the French Revolution (“Restoring the Golden Age: Myths in Revolutionary Culture and Ideology”). His recent publications include “Moving Through the Looking-Glass: Deleuzian Reflections on Mallarmé” in L’Esprit Créateur; “Between Myth and History: Michelet, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and the Structural Analysis of Myth” in Clio; and “Hyperborean Atlantis: Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Madame Blavatsky, and the Nazi Myth” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. He is currently working on a book that examines the roles of natural right, antiquarianism, and the golden age myth in eighteenth-century culture and in the politics of the Terror. Other research interests include Freemasonry, Orientalism, Illuminism, German Romanticism, and political theory.
At Stanford, Dan Edelstein teaches courses and seminars on Enlightenment political theory, libertine and philosophical literature, Rousseauism, nineteenth-century poetry, and the French Revolution. He is the co-director of the French Culture Workshop. In 2002-03 he had a Fulbright Fellowship at the Université Paris-III. In 2003 he was awarded the Naomi Schor Prize for the best graduate student paper presented at the Nineteenth Century French Studies colloquium. His undergraduate degree is from the Université de Genève.

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