The 2026 Michel Serres Distinguished Lecture: Frédérique Leichter-Flack
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
Philosophy and Literature at Stanford
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 260, Stanford, CA 94305
Rm 252
The Department of French and Italian presents:
The 2026 Michel Serres Distinguished Lecture
Frédérique Leichter-Flack, Full Professor of Literature and Political Humanities at the Centre for History at Sciences Po
Ethical Dilemmas and the Laboratory of Fiction
Ethical dilemmas are not simply hard choices: they are the pressure points where our deepest commitments collide. This lecture takes literary fiction as a laboratory of moral imagination — one where tragic choices are staged, revisited, and reinterpreted over time — and explores how even outdated or opaque dilemmas from the canon can still sharpen our perception of political nuance, expand our moral emotions, and nourish democratic deliberation.
The 2026 Michel Serres Distinguished Lecture is sponsored by: French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now, Philosophy + Literature, and the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University.
Learn more about the Michel Serres Distinguished Lecture Series.
This event is free and open to the public.