Ourida Mostefai

Candidate statement

Ourida Mostefai is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Le Citoyen de Genève et la République des Lettres (2003) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique (2016). She has edited Lectures de “la Nouvelle Héloïse” (1993) and co-edited Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s “Confessions” and “Rêveries” with John C. O’Neal (2003); Rousseau and l’Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment with John T. Scott (2009); and Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau with Brigitte Weltman-Aron and Peter Westmoreland (2020). Her recent work includes a contribution to the MLA Volume on Teaching Representations of the French Revolution, which is part of a larger project on the literature of emigration in the age of Revolutions. She has recently served as the President of the Rousseau Association (2015-2019) and is preparing a critical edition of Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert in collaboration with Rudy Le Menthéour. For ASECS, she was the co-Chair with Larry Wolff of the annual meeting of the Society in Boston (2004) and has served on a number of committees, including as Chair of the Clifford Prize Committee and as Associate Editor and Editor of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (1998-2002). She currently serves as a member of the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies.