Tili Boon Cuillé

Candidate statement

Tili Boon Cuillé is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where she co-convenes the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon with Rebecca Messbarger. She is a specialist of eighteenth-century French literature, philosophy, and aesthetics with a particular interest in the visual and performing arts. Her book Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France, made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor, has just been published by Stanford University Press. She is also the author of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto, 2006) and co-editor with Karyna Szmurlo of Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts (Bucknell, 2013). Her articles on natural history, opera, painting, and the novel have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Opera Quarterly, among others. She has served on the MLA Division Executive Committee for Eighteenth-Century French Literature and on the Editorial Board of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Her current research is on magical objects, material culture, and book illustration in French libertine fiction.