Andrei Pesic
Andrei Pesic is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern France, with a special interest in the arts and economic thought.
His current book manuscript, entitled The Enlightenment in Concert: Music, Markets, and Inadvertent Secularization (under advance contract) uses the history of music to reexamine key questions in the history of the Enlightenment. It shows how concert series in eighteenth-century Europe brought sacred music into the marketplace for entertainment. The transformations resulting from this mixture of art, religion, and commerce illuminate how a process of secularization might emerge inadvertently due to competitive market pressures rather than as the result of an intentional project.
Other current projects include an intellectual history of the concept of competition and its use in annual painting displays in Paris (the salons) in the eighteenth century.
His research has been supported by the ACLS-Mellon Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), and the France-Stanford Center. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Andrei was a postdoctoral researcher at the New York Public Library (2015-16).
Andrei earned his Ph.D. in history in 2015 from Princeton University under the supervision of Anthony Grafton, David Bell, and Wendy Heller. Prior to that, he earned an MSc at Oxford University in Economic and Social History (2008), where he held the Michael Von Clemm Fellowship, and an A.B. from Harvard in Economics (2007).
Publications and work in progress
“Concerts and Inadvertent Secularization: Religious Music in the Entertainment Market of Eighteenth-century Paris,” Past and Present (2021) 250 (1): 135-69.
“The Flighty Coquette Sings on Easter Sunday: Music and Religion in Saint-Domingue, 1765–1789,” French Historical Studies (2019) 42 (4): 563-593.
With L. Delpech, “Musique de la foi, musique du pouvoir : musiques religieuses d’apparat dans les cours régnantes d’Europe au temps de Louis XIV,” Eighteenth-Century Music, vol. 11:1 (2014) pp. 149–52.
Book reviews
Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment in H-France June 2020. https://h-france.net/vol20reviews/vol20no96pesic.pdf
Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier, Administrer les Menus Plaisirs du roi, in Annales HSS, July-September 2016, n° 3, p. 759-61. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/644211/summary
Michael Kwass, Contraband: The Making of a Global Underground, in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, vol. 23, no. 1, Spring 2016. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/688210
Conference organization
“Art and Power,” Stanford University, February 2018
Teaching at Stanford
French 130 "Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance French Literature," Autumn 2019
Art History 110/310/French 110 “French Painting from the Revolution to Impressionism,” winter 2019
French 121/221 “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Politics, Philosophy, and Literature,” autumn 2018
French 252/Art History 252A, “Art and Power” spring 2018
French 238/Art History 238C “Art and the Market,” spring 2017
French 215/History 208G “Taking to the Streets: Experiencing the Age of Revolutions,” winter 2017