Assistant Professor of French
dhl10@columbia.edu
515 Philosophy Hall
(212) 854-2500
Daniel Leonard's research interests include 17th- and 18th-century French philosophy and literature, history of science, contemporary philosophy, and comparative literature. He received his BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Davis, and afterwards spent a year and a half studying Russian language and literature at Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University. During his PhD studies at Columbia, he wrote an MA thesis comparing Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs and Nabokov's Lolita, studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and taught Literature Humanities for the Columbia Core Curriculum. As part of Bard College's Prison Initiative, he taught a course on Rousseau to inmates at Eastern State Penitentiary; he has also taught in the Barnard College English Department and humanities at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Sciences and Arts. His dissertation, entitled "Painted Chimeras, Animated Grottoes and the Feigned World: Fable and Tableau in Descartes Philosophy and Physics," examines Descartes' use of both narrative form and visual order as productive, investigatory tools and proposes viewing this creative verbal and pictorial technology as an important model for subsequent developments in Enlightenment thought. He is currently working on a larger project tracing the use of both literary devices and artistic analogies in French Enlightenment treatments of the senses, knowledge and human nature, and has given papers and published on Diderot and Condillac. In addition, he is completing an English translation of Charles de Brosses' Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches.
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