Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned with what it meant to be human. This collection of essays traces the concept of ‘humanity’ through revolutionary politics, feminist biography, portraiture, explorer narratives, libertine and Orientalist fiction, the philosophy of conversation and musicology.

Alexander Cook is a specialist in eighteenth-century cultural history based in the School of History at the Australian National University. He is co-editor of History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Association. He has published in Intellectual History Review, History Workshop Journal, Criticism and Sexualities. He is currently completing a monograph on the French philosopher, historian and revolutionary Constantin-François Volney., Ned Curthoys is a research fellow in English in the School of Cultural Inquiry at the Australian National University. His publications include the co-edited Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public-Intellectual (2007) and The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation (2013)., Shino Konishi is a fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. She is the author of The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (2012), and the editor of Aboriginal History.