Events

The Theory Center invites you to the following events for Spring 2026. All Theory Center events are free and open to the public.

Symposium: Montaigne's Essays

Friday, April 3, 2026, 8:30am - 5:30pm
Global and International Studies Building, Room 1060 (Maxwell Hall 122, 4:00 - 5:30pm)
The Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities presents a symposium on Montaigne's Essays, convened by Herbert Marks (Comparative Literature) and Hall Bjørnstad (French and Italian). Guest speakers Antonia Szabari (University of Southern California) and Pierre Lyraud (University of Montreal) are joined by Alison Calhoun and Eric MacPhail (both IU Bloomington). We are grateful for support from the Departments, of Comparative Literature, French & Italian, Germanic Studies, and Spanish & Portuguese.

Schedule of Events

Alison Calhoun: "Before and After Autobiography, With and Against Self-Knowledge"

The one constant we can attest to in all the varied editions of Montaigne’s Essays is the constant of movement. “Essaying,” for Montaigne, was about finding ways of painting the self, of modeling a new, writerly Socrates without arresting his own identity as model. But do the printed Essays undermine Montaigne’s project by freezing it in one place, or do the revisions and allongeails of the Bordeaux copy enable him to escape the danger of fixation? Although Socrates never wrote anything down, he had scribes like Plato to tell his life story, transcribe his non-prescriptive dialogues, even write about his death. This paper will explore how Montaigne, scribe-less, both succeeds and fails at constructing a new Socratic model with and against self-knowledge.

Alison Calhoun is a scholar of early modern literature and drama in the Department of French and Italian at IU. 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.

Pierre Lyraud: "Frivolous Montaigne: Subtlety and Unsubtleness in the Essays and in Pascal's Pensées"

“We must glide over the surface of the world, not break through into it": this is one of the recommendations made by Montaigne ("Of husbanding your will"), who thereby defines a willingly superficial clear-sightedness — a combination of subtlety with a selective impassiveness (“my sight is clear but I fix it on few objects”). This paper will dwell on this paradox while exploring what seeing or living “en gros” means for Montaigne. I will focus especially on the examination of frivolity in “Of diversion” (III.4), arguing that its most insightful reader has been Pascal, but not for the reasons usually given.

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.


Eric MacPhail: "Essays Have No Shame"

In “Of idleness” Montaigne explains his motivation for undertaking the project of the Essais. In retirement he thought to put his mind at ease, but instead his mind bolted like a runaway horse and ran on uncontrolled. As a consequence, he determined to record his idle thoughts, hoping in time to make his mind "ashamed of itself" (“esperant avec le temps luy en faire honte à luy mesme”). Sorry, it didn’t work. Essays have no shame. This is something we learn from Montaigne’s use of other writers, but also from a curious argument he makes in the “Apology,” where he claims that Cynicism devalues pleasure because "shame is a sort of weight" (“une espece de poix”). Assuming, with Frame, that poix means poids (weight), why can’t the essays bear the weight of shame?

Eric MacPhail is professor of French at I.U. 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.


Antonia Szabari: "Montaigne, Distancologist: The Case of the Cannibals and the Dervish in the Essays"

We are accustomed to view Montaigne’s erudite yet playful essays as the exercises of a cosmopolitan mind, one that regards others with benevolence, or at least with openness. This lecture aims to challenge this view, offering instead a reading of Montaigne as a “distancologist”—a writer intent on measuring and traversing the distance between himself and others. Such a project, I argue, is riddled with political agency and dependent on a proto-colonial perspective. Focusing on Montaigne’s cursory comments on dervishes (ascetic holy men) in the Ottoman Empire, I analyze the agency of the naked body in the Essays and show how Montaigne’s discussion of the dervish intersects with his more famous account of the New World’s “cannibals,” while connecting early modern attitudes toward material fluidity and mobility with current critical notions of plasticity and race.

Antónia Szabari is a 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.