James Swenson

James Swenson, Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University, is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history, and twentieth-century criticism and theory. At Rutgers since 1993, he served as Undergraduate and Graduate Director and as Chair from 2005–2010.

He works extensively on Rousseau and the varieties of Rousseauism in France at the time of the Revolution and is pursuing a long-standing project on Revolutionary cultural policies and initiatives and the conception of the domain of culture during the Revolution, focusing in particular on Saint-Just’s project for “revolutionary institutions.”  He has also begun work on economic theorization in eighteenth-century France in the context of a comparative study of forms of rationality in the period.