Jean Balsamo, Professor at the Université de Reims, teaches sixteenth century French literature, philology and book history. Co-editor of Montaigne's Essais in the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade" (Gallimard, 2007), he published De la Servitude volontaire. Rhétorique et politique en France sous les derniers Valois (Presses de l'Université de Rouen, 2014, with Déborah Knop), a volume dedicated to La Boétie. Amongst his latest publications is L'amorevolezza verso le cose Italiche. Le Livre italien à Paris au XVIe siècle (Geneva, Droz, 2015).
Sarah Bakewell is an independent scholar and biographer. She teaches in the Master Studies program in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford, and was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London. Her books include How to Live: A Life of Montaigne (Chatto & Windus, 2010; Other Press, 2011), recipient of the National Books Circle Award for Biography in the United States, the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction in the United Kingdom), translated in a dozen languages, and, most recently, a biographical study of existentialist philosophers, At the Existentialist Café (Chatto & Windus / Other Press, 2016).
Warren Boutcher is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. His two-volume study of The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe (vol. one, The patron-author; vol. two, The reader-writer) was published in 2016 by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on transnational literatures in late Renaissance Europe, and has chapters on that subject forthcoming in International exchange in the European book world (Brill, eds. Sara Barker and Matthew McLean) and in Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text & Transmission (Oxford University Press, eds. Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau), both forthcoming in 2016.
Katie Chenoweth is Assistant Professor of French at Princeton University. She specializes in the history of print and other media with a focus on Renaissance France. She is currently completing a book on language and technology in the sixteenth century titled The Prosthetic Tongue: Print Technology and the Uncanny Rise of the Vernacular in Renaissance France. She is also working on Montaigne's place in modern critical theory, especially in the work of Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Derrida.
Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor at Harvard University, teaches in the departments of Visual & Environmental Studies and Romance Languages. He has been visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the École nationale des Chartes. Recent books include À fleur de page: voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (Classiques Garnier, 2015), An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and Cartographic Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He has translated works by Marc Augé, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and others. He is currently a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute.
Philippe Desan is Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature and History of Culture at the University of Chicago. Among his most recent books are Montaigne: A Life in Politics and Letters (Princeton University Press, 2016), Bibliotheca Desaniana. Catalogue Montaigne (Classiques Garnier, 2011), and Montaigne. Les formes du monde et de l'esprit (Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008). He edited the Essays of 1582 (2005), the Bordeaux Copy of the Essays (2002) and Montaigne's Travel Journal (2014) and is the general editor of Montaigne Studies.
Valérie M. Dionne is an Associate Professor of Early Modern French Literature and Culture at Colby College. She is the author of Montaigne, écrivain de la conciliation (Classiques Garnier, 2014), and co-editor of "Revelations of Character": Ethos, Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy in Montaigne (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
Kathy Eden is Chavkin Family Professor of English and Professor of Classics at Columbia University. Her books include Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1986), Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (Yale University Press, 1997), Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property and the "Adages" of Erasmus (Yale University Press, 2001), and The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Andrea Frisch is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in French, and Core Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature, at the University of Maryland. A specialist of travel literature and of the cultural impact of religious conflict in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, she is the author of The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and of Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
Biancamaria Fontana is professor of the History of Political Ideas at the Centre Walras Pareto of the University of Lausanne, and former fellow of King's College (Cambridge) and of the European University (Florence). She is the editor of Benjamin Constant, Political Writings (Cambridge, 1988). Her works include: Benjamin Constant and the Post-revolutionary Mind (Yale, 1991), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, 1994), Montaigne's Politics, Authority and Governance in the Essais (Princeton, 2008), Du boudoir à la Révolution: Laclos et les Liaisons dangereuses dans leur siècle (Agone, 2013). Her new book is Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait (Princeton University Press, 2016).
Mark Greengrass is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield, UK, a Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Warwick, and a membre associé of the Centre Roland Mousnier, Université Paris-Sorbonne. He also co-directed the British Academy John Foxe Project that published the variorum edition online of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. He is author, most recently, of Christendom Destroyed (1517-1648), volume V of the Penguin History of Europe (London and New York, 2014).
Thierry Gontier is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Lyon 3 and a honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Among his recent books is La Question de l'animal. Les origines du débat moderne (Hermann, 2011). He translated the De immortalitate animæ of Pietro Pomponazzi (Belles Lettres, 2012) and Plato and Aristotle by Eric Voegelin (Éditions du Cerf, 2015). He edited or co-edited Le Socratisme de Montaigne (Classiques Garnier, 2010) and Politique, religion et histoire chez Eric Voegelin (Éditions du Cerf, 2011). He is the editor of the journal Éthique, politique, religions.
Elizabeth Guild lectures in French at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Robinson College. Among her many publications is, most recently, Unsettling Montaigne: Poetics, Ethics and Affect in the Essais and other Writings (D.S. Brewer, 2014).
Mireille Habert is Associate Professor of French at the Université de la Réunion (Indian Ocean). She is author of Montaigne traducteur de la Théologie naturelle. Plaisantes et sainctes imaginations (Classiques Garnier, 2010). She has also published on Raymond Sebond and Marie de Gournay.
William M. Hamlin is professor of English literature at Washington State University. He is the author of three books, including Montaigne's English Journey: Reading the Essays in Shakespeare's Day (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He is recipient of fellowships from the British Academy, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation.
Ann Hartle is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of two books on Montaigne: Montaigne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2013), and Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 2003). She has also written three books on the history and nature of philosophy: Self-Knowledge in the Age of Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), Death and the Disinterested Spectator: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1986), and The Modern Self in Rousseau's "Confessions": A Reply to St. Augustine (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
Dorothea Heitsch is Senior Lecturer of French at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has published Practising Reform in Montaigne's Essais (Brill, 2000) and co-edited a volume entitled Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (University of Toronto Press, 2004). Her articles have appeared in Rhetorica, Literature and Medicine, Romanic Review, Montaigne Studies, and Erasmus Studies.
George Hoffmann is Professor of French at the Unveristy of Michigan in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He is the author of Montaigne's Career (Oxford University Press, 1998). In addition, he edited an issue Montaigne Studies devoted to "Les Biographies de Montaigne" (2008) and was a contributor to the Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, edited by Philippe Desan (Champion, 2007).
Déborah Knop is a researcher at the RARE (Rhetoric from Antiquity to the French Revolution) laboratory based in Grenoble, France. She is co-author (with Jean Balsamo) of De la Servitude volontaire: rhétorique et politique en France sous les derniers Valois (Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 2014). She also co-edited La Boétie et le Discours de la servitude volontaire (Fabula online proceedings, 2015). Her research focuses on rhetorical practices in Renaissance prose, poetry and theater.
Marie-Clarté Lagrée teaches history at the French International Lycée of Washington DC. She taught for the Université Paris-Sorbonne and the Paris Sorbonne University in Abu Dhabi. She is author of "C'est moy que je peins". Figures de soi à l'automne de la Renaissance (Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011) and co-edited Les Stratégies de l'échec. Enquêtes sur l'action politique à l'époque moderne (Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014).
Ullrich Langer is Alfred Glauser Professor of French and former director of the Center for Early Modern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Editor of the Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (2005), his recent publications include Penser les formes littéraires du plaisir à la Renaissance (Classiques Garnier, 2009) and Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is working on a graphic novel on the life and writings of Montaigne. He is co-organizer, with Paul-Alexis Mellet, of a long-term project on the remontrances of the Ancien Régime.
Alain Legros is a researcher at the Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Université de Tours, France). Among other books on Montaigne, he is the author of Essais sur Poutres. Peintures et inscriptions chez Montaigne (Klincksieck, 2000); Montaigne manuscrit (Classiques Garnier, 2010); and a genetic edition of "Of prayers" (Essais. I, 56, Droz, 2003). Member of the editorial board of Montaigne Studies, he is an active member of a new digital edition of various texts and documents by and on Montaigne and La Boétie for the "Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes," an online collection of primary resources.
Kathleen Long is Professor of French at Cornell University, and the author of Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Work of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard (Peter Lang, 1990) and Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Ashgate, 2006), and editor of High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, Religious Differences in France: Past and Present (Truman State University Press, 2002) and Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2010).
John D. Lyons is Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on early modern French literature, intellectual history and film. He served as the director of the Centre Américain du Cinéma à Paris and was chair of the Comparative Literature program at Dartmouth College. He has recently edited the Cambridge Companion to French Literature (2015). His books include The Phantom of Chance (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Before Imagination. Embodied Thought From Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford University Press, 2005). He is a chevalier in the Légion d'Honneur.
Eric MacPhail is Professor of French and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, where he has taught since 1988. He is the author, most recently, of Dancing Around the Well: The Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism (Brill, 2014). Since 2013 he has served as editor of Erasmus Studies, published under the auspices of the Erasmus of Rotterdam Society. He is the co-editor, along with two colleagues, of the new scholarly edition of Jean Bodin's Démonomanie des sorciers (Droz, 2016).
Michel Magnien teaches French and neo-Latin literature at the Université de Paris Sorbonne-nouvelle. Author of over a hundred articles on authors from the Renaissance, including Dolet, Scaliger, La Boétie, Du Bellay, Ronsard, and Montaigne, he co-edited a new edition of the Essais for the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade" (Gallimard, 2007), and is contributing to new editions of D'Aubigné's and Du Bellay's Œuvres complètes for the Classiques Garnier. He also edited and translated Aristotle's Poetics for "Le Livre de Poche" edition, 1990.
Peter Mack is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. His books include Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Brill, 1993), Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2010) and A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (Oxford University Press, 2011). Recently he has coedited Michael Baxandall: Vision and the Work of Words (Ashgate, 2015) and The Afterlife of Ovid (Institute of Classical Studies, 2015).
Mary McKinley is the Douglas Huntly Gordon Professor of French Emerita at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Words in a Corner: Studies in Montaigne's Latin Quotations (French Forum, 1981) and Les Terrains vagues des Essais: itinéraires et intertextes (Champion, 1996), and editor and translator of Marie Dentière's Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin (University of Chicago Press, 2004). She is the co-editor of Companion to Marguerite de Navarre (Brill, 2013) and Critical Tales: New Studies of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron and Early Modern Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
Jan Miernowski is Professor of French at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and Visiting Professor at the University of Warsaw. He has published on Renaissance scientific poetry, negative theology, early modern allegory, and Montaigne's skepticism. His most recent books include La Beauté de la haine. Essais de misologie littéraire (Droz, 2014), Le Sublime et le grotesque (edited volume, Droz, 2014), and Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Anti-Humanism in Dialogue (edited volume, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Peterhouse. His publications include Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Roland Barthes (Polity Press, 1991), Early Modern French Thought: the Age of Suspicion (Oxford University Press, 2003), Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has translated Descartes's Meditations and The Passions of the Soul for the Oxford World's Classics series. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Cynthia Nazarian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian and affiliated faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. Her book, Love's Wounds: Violence, Counter-sovereignty and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.
John O'Brien is Professor of French at the University of Durham. He is the author of Anacreon Redivivus: A Study of Anacreontic Translation in Mid-Sixteenth-Century France (University of Michigan Press, 1995), the editor of (Ré)interprétations (1995) and La familia de Montaigne (2001), and the co-editor of Montaigne et la rhétorique (1995), Belleau's Les Odes d'Anacréon (1995), and Distant Voices Still Heard (2000). He is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Rabelais (2011).
Todd W. Reeser is Professor of French and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published three monographs: Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Masculinities in Theory (Blackwell, 2010), and Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2016). He co-edited "Entre hommes": French and Francophone Masculinities in Theory and Culture (University of Delaware Press, 2008) and Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais (MLA, 2011).
Timothy J. Reiss is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. His most recent books are Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange (Stanford University Press, 2002), Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford University Press, 2003) and the edited collections Music, Writing and Cultural Unity in the Caribbean (Africa World Press, 2005), and (co-ed.) Topographies of Race and Gender: Mapping Cultural Representations (Annals of Scholarship, 2007).
François Rigolot is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of a number of studies, including Les Langages de Rabelais (1972, 1986), Poétique et onomastique (1977), Le Texte de la Renaissance (1982), Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne (1988), La Renaissance au féminin (1997), L'Erreur de la Renaissance (2002), and Poésie et Renaissance (2003). He also edited Montaigne's Journal de voyage (Presses universitaires de France, 1992), and the complete works of Louise Labé (Flammarion, 2nd ed., 2004), and Clément Marot (Flammarion, 2007-2008). He is currently working on the implications of first-person narrative in the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose poems were read as political documents leading to her incrimination.
Zachary Sayre Schiffman is the Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. His chief research interest has been in the area of Renaissance historiography and its place in the tradition of Western historical thought. He is author of The Birth of the Past (Johns Hopkins, 2011) and On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 1991), co-author of Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 1998), and editor of Humanism and the Renaissance (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
Richard Scholar is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Oriel College. His books include: Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking (Peter Lang, 2010; French trans. 2015); The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2005; French trans. 2010); and, as co-editor, Montaigne in Transit (Legenda, 2016; with Neil Kenny and Wes Williams), Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day (Liverpool University Press, 2015; with Eva Sansavior), and Pre-Histories and Afterlives (Legenda, 2010; with Anna Holland).
Cynthia Skenazi is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among her publications are Marie Gevers et la nature (Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Françaises de Belgique, Palais des Académies, 1983), Maurice Scève et la pensée chrétienne (Droz, 1992), Le Poète architecte en France. Constructions d'un imaginaire monarchique (Champion, 2003), and Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance: Stories of Later Life from Petrarch to Montaigne (Brill, 2013).
Paul J. Smith is Professor of French literature at Leiden University. His research focuses on sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth century French literature, its reception in the Netherlands, French and Dutch fable books, literary rhetoric and intermediality. He has also published on early modern animal symbolism and zoology. His book publications include Voyage et écriture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Droz, 1987), Dispositio. Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Brill, 2007), and Réécrire la Renaissance, de Marcel Proust à Michel Tournier. Exercices de lecture rapprochée (Rodopi, 2009). He edited Translating Montaigne (Montaigne Studies, 2011) and co-edited Montaigne and the Low Countries (1580-1700) (Brill, 2007).
Wes Williams is Professor of French Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall. His first book, 'The Undiscovered Country': Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance (Clarendon Press, 1999), was the first full-length study of the place of pilgrimage within Renaissance culture. Recent publications include Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: 'Mighty Magic' (Oxford University Press, 2012) and a chapter on Montaigne in Lucretius and the Early Modern (Oxford University Press, 2015). He also writes and directs for the theater and (occasionally) for film.
Zahi Zalloua is Associate Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College and editor of The Comparatist. He has published Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (Rookwood Press, 2005) and Reading Unruly: Interpretation and its Ethical Demands (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). His forthcoming book is entitled Beyond the Jew and the Greek: Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question. He has edited two volumes on Montaigne, Montaigne and the Question of Ethics (2006) and Montaigne After Theory, Theory After Montaigne (University of Washington Press, 2009).
