Thomas Kavanagh

August R. Street Professor of French 

Thomas Kavanagh, B.S. Holy Cross College, Ph.D. Yale University, faculty member at SUNY Buffalo, Universities of Colorado, Michigan, California, Berkeley, and faculty member at Yale since 2002: your capacious mind and eloquent voice have dominated our understanding of the culture of the French Enlightenment over the last four decades. You had the courage to tackle neglected aspects of the eighteenth century, to synthesize the study of literature and the social sciences, to reconcile esthetics, philosophy, and literature in a series of influential books, articles and reviews focused on the major figures of the period—Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Casanova, Graffigny, Watteau, Poussin, Boucher, and Fragonard. 

In your first book, The Vacant Mirror, you used French theory to revise our understanding of the mimetic conventions of story-telling. Your second book, Writing the Truth, contained a startling psychoanalytic interpretation of Rousseau’s combined literary, political, and personal writings. In your third free-standing volume, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, which won the Modern Language Association’s prestigious Scaglione Prize, you traced with consummate brilliance and erudition the coincident growth of the novel as a form and of the probability theory that made us mathematically modern. Your move into the field of art history in your 1997 volume Esthetics of the Moment embraced the various ways the Enlightenment valorized the present moment—as an Epicurean, an epiphanic, a supra-historical, or a fortuitous experience of the here and now. At the apex of a distinguished career, you not so much indulged your life-long love of gambling as made playing the numbers worthy of genuine intellectual inquiry. Your 2005 volume Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture and your 2010 Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism make the history of French literature richer, more challenging, and more pleasurable. 

Yale’s French Department has benefitted immensely from your wisdom as an undergraduate teacher and mentor of graduate students, and from your twinkly, equanimous, steady hand as departmental Chair. As you retire from this faculty, your colleagues, proud of the multiplicity of your gifts and your achievements, celebrate your significant and original contributions to French Studies, Literary Studies, and to the Humanities writ large.