Avi Lifschitz

Enlightenment Workshop

Happy to announce the Enlightenment Workshop Programme 2025-26!

This year convened by Nicholas Cronk and Jacob Chatterjee (New College).

Come for a packed November!

www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/home/researc...

How universalist was Enlightenment thought? In our 2025 Besterman Lecture, Antoine Lilti (Collège de France) discusses 'The three languages of universalism: thinking globally in the Enlightenment’. Thursday 13 Nov, 5pm @magdalenoxford.bsky.social:
voltaire.ox.ac.uk/event/bester...

Extended deadline!

Call for Papers now open until 20 October.

The excellent journal Lumières is looking for contributions to its 'varia' and book review sections. More info: www.pub-editions.fr/fr/868-lumie...; past issues: shs.cairn.info/revue-lumier...

This week's 'Last Word', BBC Radio 4, includes the medieval historian Barbara Harvey (1928-2025) bit.ly/3KmCQ6M (9 mins 32).

Among her many contributions to the profession, Barbara was Vice President of the Society, 1986-90. With contributions from former colleagues Joanna Innes and John Blair.

Do you work on the intellectual history of the long 18th century?

Have you an interest in subjects relating to poverty and inequalities?

Then you should definitely answer this call!

For more info, you can dm me ✉️

Enlightening the king: French-Swedish relations in the letters of Gustaf Philip Creutz with Gustav III

Happy to share my new blog post on C18 French-Swedish relations for the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History blog @oxfordcih.bsky.social. French-Swedish diplomacy treated cultural alignment as a powerful vehicle for political change in Sweden👇
intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/enli...

In 2026, to accompany the digital edition of Voltaire’s complete works (OV: www.ov-vf.com), the Voltaire Foundation will launch Voltaire Iconography – an open-access critically annotated database of visual representations of Voltaire.

www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/digital-enli...

Call for Papers: A social question before the Social Question - Addressing poverty in the long eighteenth century University of Oxford 22-23 October 2026 A pdf file of this call can be found here. Precariousness and hardships were inescapable features of the life of the lower orders in early modern European…

Call for Papers!

A social question before the Social Question – Addressing poverty in the long eighteenth century

Deadline 31 December 2025

voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/ca...

Calling all librarians – sign up for Oxford University Voltaire free trial The Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press are delighted to announce that the new online edition of Voltaire’s complete works, including extensive scholarly apparatus, is now available …

Read all about our new digital edition, Oxford University Voltaire, in the newest blog by our research editors!

And ask your librarian for the free trial!

voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2025/09/10/c...

Apply by 27 October!

Congratulations to Mrinalini Wadhwa of our MPhil in Intellectual History (and @magdalenoxford.bsky.social) on a fascinating blog post @jhideas.bsky.social!

New on the blog | 'The making and remaking of the Enlightenment' by Hanna Roman & Olivia Sabee. In this post, the authors reflect on their recent publication in the series and its relevance to the current political climate. Read now: bit.ly/remaking-the-enlightenment 📚 @voltaire.ox.ac.uk #c18

J. G. A. Pocock, essay on the fourth volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall This essay presents J. G. A. Pocock reflections on Gibbon’s fourth volume and the shift it marks in the Decline and Fall towards a narrative we might consider ‘Byzantine’. It is the work of Gibbon’...

Don’t miss our DPhil student Harun Ali's thorough introduction to a posthumous essay by the great J. G. A. Pocock! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Reading ‘Candide’ during the French Revolution The Taylor Institution Library (Bodleian Libraries) has recently acquired a rare printing of Candide dating from the Revolutionary period: this edition of 1791 was not known to the principal biblio…

📝 New Blog Post! 📝

Check out this new @voltaire.ox.ac.uk blog post by Nicholas Cronk, celebrating our recent acquisition of a rare printing of Voltaire's Candide, from 1791.

Read on to learn more about the novel itself and the history of its publication, as well as more details on our new edition!

Reading ‘Candide’ during the French Revolution The Taylor Institution Library (Bodleian Libraries) has recently acquired a rare printing of Candide dating from the Revolutionary period: this edition of 1791 was not known to the principal biblio…

As promised, the latest news (blog) about this rare printing of Candide!

voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2025/08/28/r...

A quote from the article: "We may never truly be alone in Kantianism, but we are also never really together—perhaps to our ultimate advantage."

The recent issue of the JHI includes an article by Ingrid Schreiber: "Egoism and Sociability in the Kantian Public Sphere" muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

Promotional image for the book La Place Louis XV from the Old Regime to the Revolution: King and people in the Parisian royal square by Victoria E. Thompson. The book cover is shown on the right, featuring an illustration of an 18th-century Parisian square with a statue of a mounted figure and a large crowd. On the left, the same illustration is used as a faded background with a blue box containing the text: 'A new perspective on the decline of the monarchy in the eighteenth century by focusing the analysis on an urban space.' Logos at the bottom include Liverpool University Press, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation, and University of Oxford.

New to the series | La Place Louis XV from the Old Regime to the Revolution by Victoria E. Thompson. Find out more, and purchase directly for 20% off RRP: bit.ly/LaPlaceLouisXV #EighteenthCentury 📖 @voltaire.ox.ac.uk

A book opened on the title page of the 1791 edition of Voltaire’s Candide. The book lies on supports and a book snake is holding the page down.

Exciting news about the recent acquisition of a 1791 edition of Voltaire’s Candide. The edition is recorded – there are copies in Geneva and Louvain – but it is certainly rare. A Voltaire Foundation (voltairefoundation.wordpress.com) and @tayoxford.bsky.social blog coming soon!

For #WorldElephantDay, here's J.-P.-L. Houël's classic depiction of elephants having sex in 1803 (from the British Library):

(h/t @diderotesque.bsky.social, author of the magnificent article "The Book of Job & the Sex Life of Elephants", Journal of Modern History vol. 91 [Dec. 2019]: pp. 739–75.)

Congrats to Ingrid Schreiber, a recent DPhil @oxhistoryfaculty.bsky.social @wadhamcollege.bsky.social, on the publication of her fascinating article in the august @jhideas.bsky.social, re-examining recent attempts to view Kant as a social (or proto-sociological) thinker. doi.org/10.1353/jhi....

Promotional graphic for the book Cultural Transmission and the French Enlightenment: Repurposing the Past, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee. The right side shows the book cover, featuring a blue top section with the title and editor names, and a historical illustration of a woman writing at a desk below. On the left side of the graphic is a grayscale engraving of a woman, with decorative scrollwork in the background. Centered text reads: “Illuminates material forms of knowledge and their circulation, defining Enlightenment as invention, repurposing, and reception.” Logos at the bottom include Liverpool University Press, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, and the Voltaire Foundation.

New to the series | Cultural transmission and the French Enlightenment, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee. Find out more, and purchase directly for 20% off RRP: bit.ly/Cultural-Tra... #EighteenthCentury 📖
@voltaire.ox.ac.uk

Five funded PhD positions (4 years each) at the Politics of Enlightenment research group at IZEA @unihalle.bsky.social! Details here: polight.uni-halle.de/en/five-posi...

The Eighteenth-Century Studies Collection offers over 700 volumes from two perpetual access digital collections and includes a complete archive of all content published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series between 1955–2021.

Find out more > bit.ly/digital-enli...

'Dropping Out' as Political Thought? Towards a Global Intellectual History of Hippies

📢 New Blog

Robert James Taylor, '"Dropping Out" as Political Thought? Towards a Global Intellectual History of Hippies'

intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/drop...

Promotional graphic for “The Age of Du Pont de Nemours,” edited by Anthony Mergey and Arnault Skornicki, published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. The image features a grayscale portrait of Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours on the left and the book cover on the right, which includes the same portrait. Text reads: “A book retracing the life and work of Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours in new disciplines.” Logos of Liverpool University Press & the Voltaire Foundation are displayed at the bottom.

New to the series | The age of Du Pont de Nemours: Politics, law and physiocracy in the Ancien Régime to the American republic, edited by Arnault Skornicki and Anthony Mergey. Find out more, and purchase directly for 20% off RRP: bit.ly/DuPontdeNemours #EighteenthCentury 📖
@voltaire.ox.ac.uk

Many congratulations to Michaela Kalcher @oxhistoryfaculty.bsky.social!

Transatlantic slavery and the German Enlightenment Among non-specialists, it remains a commonplace that Germans played little, if any, appreciable role in the transatlantic slave system. Even some specialists in German history have assumed that eig…

How were 18thC Germans involved in transatlantic slavery, in the absence of an overseas empire? Morgan Golf-French (Fondazione 1563, Turin) writes in our blog on the German Enlightenment's discourses on, and entanglements with, slavery: voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2025/06/27/t...

Reforming Religion, Morality and Society in Afro-Eurasia: Intellectual and Cultural Traditions in Motion in the Global Eighteenth Century

📢 Call for Papers | Deadline 1 July

intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/event/reform...

Finding Candide where you least expect it This blog is based on the article by Gillian Pink, ‘L’allégorie d’Alcibiade et le dossier génétique de Candide’, recently published in the Revue Voltaire 24 (2025), p.239-251. Deciding to read Volt…

Reading Voltaire's entire correspondence (over 20,000 letters in 45 vols) has its disadvantages and rewards, says Gillian Pink. Read her blog post on one of the latter - a 1753 letter containing elements of Voltaire's Candide (1759): voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2025/06/20/f...