Bibliography Week Lecture: “The Bordeaux Academy of Sciences and the Great Race Contest of 1741”

In August of 1739, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences publicized a “prize puzzle” in Europe’s best-known scientific journal. The subject was a riddle that had long perplexed Europeans: “What is the cause of the Sub-Saharan Africans’ peculiar hair texture and dark skin?” While this query theoretically limited itself to discussion of African physical features, what really preoccupied the Academy were three hidden questions: the first two were who is Black? and why? The third was an even bigger concern, namely, what did being Black signify? In this talk, Andrew Curran will both explain the genesis of this competition and its wider relationship to the Enlightenment quest to define the human species.

About the Speaker
Andrew S. Curran, PhD
Andrew S. Curran is an eighteenth-century specialist and the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. He has published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Guardian, Time Magazine, Newsweek, El País, the Paris Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of three books. His most recent book, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), was named one of the best biographies of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, NRC, the Australian, Open Letters Review, the Irish Times, and El Cultural. Curran’s previous book was The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment. Translated into French as L’Anatomie de la noirceur, this same book was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the French l’Académie des sciences d’outre-mer.

Curran is a fellow of The New York Academy of Medicine, was the recipient of the NYAM Library’s Paul Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine for 2009-2010, and is a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques. He has also received grants and fellowships from the French Government, The Mellon Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Humanities, most recently an NEH Public Scholarship. His latest book, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., entitled Who is Black and Why? A Forgotten Chapter in the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race, will be released in March 2022. His current project is entitled The Race Makers, a book that he describes as the first biographical history of race.

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