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
DLCL 100 CAPITALS: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and Peoples, Winter 2024
French 110/Art History 110, “French Painting from Watteau to Monet,” Spring 2019
French 121/221, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Politics, Philosophy, and Literature,” Fall 2018
French 130, “An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance French Literature,” Fall 2019
French 131, “Absolutism, Enlightenment, and Revolution in 17th- and 18th-Century France,” Spring and Fall 2021
French 132, “Literature, Revolutions, and Changes in 19th- and 20th-Century France,” Spring 2022, Winter 2023, spring 2024
French 215/History 208G “Taking to the Streets: Experiencing the Age of Revolutions,” Winter 2017
French 238/Art History 238C “Art and the Market,” Spring 2017, Spring 2021, Winter 2022, Spring 2023, winter 2024
French 252/Art History 252A, “Art and Power,” Spring 2018