Profile

Flora Champy joined the Department of French and Italian as an Assistant Professor of French in September 2018. She was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2024. She holds a dual PhD in French Literature from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Rutgers University. An alumna of the ENS de Paris, she received a master’s degree in Classics from Paris IV Sorbonne University. She previously taught at the ENS de Lyon and Johns Hopkins University.

Research

Her research focuses on eighteenth-century French political literature and philosophy, blending literary analysis with political theory. Her first book, L’Antiquité politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entre exemples et modèles (Classiques Garnier, 2022), explores the role of classical Greece and Rome in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy. The book shows how Rousseau turned the traditional idea of educational exemplarity into a critical exploration of the anthropological models underlying political modernity. In other words, it is a study on how reading Plutarch and studying the Roman Republic may illuminate (and help avoid) pitfalls of the consumer-subject model of individuality. 

This initial work has led Flora Champy to develop additional interests in theories and practices of reading, and in the critical examination of critical theory. On top of numerous articles on Rousseau and the Enlightenment, she is currently working on two book projects, one on the relevance of Rousseau’s political philosophy today and the other on Enlightenment-inspired methods of reading. 

Flora Champy is currently serving as vice-president of the Rousseau Association and of the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies. She is also a regular and enthusiastic collaborator of  L'Avant-Scène, the Department of French and Italian's French Theater Workshop.

Publications

Books

• L’Antiquité politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Imagining Ancient and Oriental Languages in Enlightenment France
• Médiations et construction de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne

Selected Publications

• “Educating the Will: Rousseau as a Philosopher of Consent,” Institut Rousseau, 2024.
• Des comices romains : vote du peuple et chose publique dans Du Contrat social” [“Of the Roman Comitia: the People’s Vote and the Common in the Social Contract.”] Astérion, 29, 2023.
• “Diderot, Eisenstein, and the Paradoxes of Visual Culture,”  Diderot studies 40 (2024): 206-2018.
• “Vérité du sens et liberté de la figure: Voltaire lecteur de Pascal” [“Truthful Meanings and Figures of Freedom: Voltaire’s Reading of Pascal”] Courrier Blaise Pascal 46 (2024): 451-464.
• “Lire Montesquieu, théorie et critique” [“Reading Montesquieu: Criticism and Theory”], Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études françaises 74 (2022): 181-194.
• “The Silent Expression of the General Will,” in Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau / Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau, eds Brigitte Weltman-Aron, Ourida Mostefai, Peter Westmoreland, Brill/Rodopi, 2020.

Selected Courses 

• FRS 190: Reasons to Believe: Religions of Enlightenment
• FRE 221: The Rise of France: French Literature, Culture, and Society from the Origins to 1789
• FRE 351: The Age of Enlightenment
• FRE 352: “Women used to reign”: Women on stage in pre-Revolution France
• FRE 352: The Enlightenment “other”
• FRE 534: The Government of the People: Rousseau’s Politics
• FRE 541: Formal and Conceptual Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
• FRE 571: Political Writing in Eighteenth-Century France