About
ANDREW CURRAN is the author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), named one of the best biographies of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. Curran is also the author of The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment, which was A Choice Outstanding Academic Title and also received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the French l’Académie des sciences d’outre-mer). Most recently, he edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Who's Black and Why? at Harvard University Press, 2022, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and won a 2023 Prose Award for the best book in European history from the Association of American Editors.
Curran's writing has also published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, Newsweek, Time Magazine, El Pais, Merkur, and O Globo.
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 has also received grants and fellowships from the French Government, The Mellon Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Humanities, most recently an NEH Public Scholarship.
Born on Long Island and raised in Queens and then upstate New York, Curran has also spent years in France and attempts, whenever possible, to return to Paris where, among other things, he met his wife, rode motorcycles, studied wine, and learned how to cook. He is a committed humanist who believes, like Diderot, that “skepticism is the first step toward truth.”
His new book, edited with Henry Louis Gates. Jr., is Who's Black and Why? A Forgotten Chapter in the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Harvard, 2022).
Curran lives in Connecticut where he is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and Professor of French at Wesleyan University.
Featured Work
Who's Black and Why: A Forgotten Chapter in the Eighteeth-Century Invention of Race
The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of Black skin—an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.
In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration? the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.
Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.
These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.
Other Works
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
2019
Awards and Recognition
- A Kirkus Best Biography of 2019 for Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- A '"Must Read" Title of 2019 for Diderot
- An "Open Letters Review" Best book of 2019
- An "Independent.ie." Best Book of 2019
- An "NRC" Best Book of 2019
- Finalist, Paris-American Library Best Book of 2019
- An Amazon Best Book of the Month for Diderot
- 2023 NAACP Image Award Nominee
- 2023 Best Book in European History, Association of American Publishers
