Jan Starczewski

Born in Manchester, England, and raised in southeastern France, I came to the United States for the first time in 2000. After returning to France for a short while to complete my licence, France’s equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, I came back to the United States in 2005, and this time for good. I have now been teaching French in the United States for over 15 years.

Oftentimes, language tends to be defined by its skeleton: grammar, conjugation, and vocabulary. While having a solid foundation in the structural elements of a language is important, my goal is to breathe life into what can otherwise appear dry. My approach to teaching French thus emphasizes communication, history, and culture. By engaging with a variety of authentic texts and media types, my students make meaningful use of the French language within real-world contexts. In other words, students in my classes learn more than simply to read, write, speak, and listen in French. They become critical thinkers and problem solvers sensitive to how their perspectives are shaped by American culture as well as how they relate to those of other cultures around the world.

My research focuses on the place of religion in literary texts produced during the French Enlightenment and seeks to answer whether the French Enlightenment entirely rejected revealed religion in its project of reshaping its worldview and reforming French society. While the French Enlightenment has traditionally been perceived as the historical period when reason triumphed over religion, recent historiography suggests that this reading of eighteenth-century France needs to be challenged. By combining a close textual analysis of works by Diderot and Rousseau with an historical investigation into their cultural and religious contexts, my work shows that the influence of Christianity was greater than is typically assumed, particularly when these authors dealt with virtue and morality. My research not only offers a new perspective on these authors, but also reaches beyond the dichotomous tension between faith and reason, the sacred and the secular, to propose a new account of the place of religion in 18th-century French literature and culture. While my work strongly relies on close readings of literary texts, it also enlarges the existing field by embracing an interdisciplinary approach that gives equal attention to texts and debates from theology and moral philosophy.