Joanna Stalnaker

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Enlightenment literature, philosophy and intellectual history; women writers; description and encyclopedism; death and last works

Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia. She works on Enlightenment literature, philosophy and intellectual history, with research interests in Enlightenment women and the practice of philosophy, description and encyclopedism, and the history and literature of death. 

Stalnaker’s latest book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale, 2025), turns the question of the Enlightenment’s legacy on its head by looking at what the philosophers wrote at the end of their lives. The book argues that as they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed silence and nothingness into their last works.

Stalnaker’s first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell, 2010), won the Kenshur Prize from the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. This book shows how and why description became such a key epistemological and literary problem during the French Enlightenment. Mirroring the era itself in its capacious ambitions, the book traces the era’s vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world, in natural history, encyclopedias, scientific poetry and urban topographies. Stalnaker argues that our modern division between literature and science can be traced back to debates surrounding description during the Enlightenment.

Stalnaker’s work has also appeared in English and French in a broad range of journals and collections, including Representations, Critique, Journal of the History of Ideas, Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, A History of Modern French Literature (Princeton, 2017), A Cultural History of Death (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Lumen.

Stalnaker’s recent graduate courses include What’s Left of Enlightenment? — an effort to think through the crisis of our current moment through the lens of the Enlightenment — and Radical Enlightenment Women. At the undergraduate level she regularly teaches the Introduction to French and Francophone Literature, one of the core required courses for the major and minor in French, and the Senior Seminar. She is a devoted instructor of Literature Humaities and chaired the course from 2018-21. She is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies in French. 

Stalnaker was a recipient of the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award in 2014.