Dan Edelstein is a professor of French and, by courtesy, history at Stanford University, where he mostly works on eighteenth-century French literature, history, and political theory. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, 2009), and The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010), and is a PI for the “Mapping the Republic of Letters” digital humanities project. He is currently working on two books, one a history of natural and human rights, the other a comparative study of revolutions.