Front:
Image: First-person perspective image of hands holding an open book. The left page shows an etching portrait, labeled MICHEL SEIGNVEUR de MONTAIGNE. The right page reads “Essays of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne in three Books. With Marginal Notes and Quotations, And an Account of the Author’s Life. With a fhort Character of the Author and Tranflator, by a Perfon of Honour. Made in Englifh by CHARLES COTTON, Efq; Virefque acquirit cundo. Virg.lib.4./En. The Third Volume. The Third Edition, with the Addition of a Compleat Table to each Volume, and a full defence of the Author. LONDON, Printed for M. Gillyflower and W. Henfman in Weft-minfter-Hall, and R. Wellington in St. Paul’s Church Yard, and H. Hindmarfh in Corn-hill. 1700.”
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SYMPOSIUM: Montaigne’s Essays
Alison Calhoun – Pierre Lyraud – Eric MacPhail – Antónia Szabari
Indiana University Bloomington
Friday, April 3, 2026
The Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities
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Symposium: Montaigne’s Essays
Friday, April 3, 2026, at Indiana University Bloomington
This symposium is convened by Herbert Marks (Comparative Literature), Hall Bjørnstad (French and Italian), and the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities, with generous support from the Departments of Comparative Literature, French and Italian, Germanic Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese.
Global & International Studies Building, Room 1060
8:30 AM: Coffee and light breakfast
9:00-9:15 AM: Welcome
9:15-10:30 AM: Szabari, “Montaigne, Distancologist: The Case of the Cannibals and the Dervish in the Essays”
Antónia Szabari is professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she specializes in early modern Europe. This talk draws on her most recent book, Agents without Empire (Fordham, 2024), which received honorable mention for the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies. Her scholarship has engaged with Montaigne in publications on topics including scholastic thought, the early modern culture of reading, and botany.
10:45 AM - 12:00 PM: McPhail, “Essays Have No Shame”
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Eric McPhail is professor of French at Indiana University Bloomington, where he teaches French Renaissance literature. He edits Erasmus Studies, published under the auspices of the Erasmus of Rotterdam Society, and also edited a special issue of Montaigne Studies on “Montaigne and the Historians.” He is the author of numerous articles on Montaigne.
12:00 - 1:00 PM: Catered lunch
1:00 - 2:15 PM: Calhoun, “Before and After Autobiography, With and Against Self-Knowledge”
Alison Calhoun is a scholar of early modern literature and drama in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University. Her research on Montaigne has focused on intellectual history and the history of ideas, from ancient philosophy to more recent theoretical questions about materiality and affect. Her book Montaigne and the Lives of the Philosophers: Life Writing and Transversality in the Essays explores the role of life writing in Montaigne’s attempt to chart a multifaceted, constantly changing self.
2:30 - 3:45 PM: Lyraud, “Frivolous Montaigne: Subtlety and Unsubtleness in the Essays and in Pascal’s Pensées”
Pierre Lyraud is assistant professor at the University of Montreal, where he teaches seventeenth-century French literature and rhetoric. His thesis, published in 2022 by Honoré Champion (Paris), focused on the concept of finitude in the work of Pascal––Montaigne’s greatest seventeenth-century reader. After editing Pascal’s complete works (L’Œuvre, Paris, Bouquins, 2022) in collaboration with Laurence Plazenet, he is finishing a book on hope and consolation from Montaigne to Pascal.
Maxwell Hall, Room 122
4:00 - 5:30 PM: Colloquium, Text: III.11 Of Cripples