Andrew Kahn appointed Academic Editor of Electronic Enlightenment based at the Bodleian Library

Congratulations to Professor Andrew Kahn has been appointed Academic Editor of Electronic Enlightenment. EE, as it’s known, is a digital resource that has been transformational in eighteenth-century studies worldwide.

The eighteenth century was a great age of letter-writing. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment is often now referred to as the Republic of Letters since the writing and circulation of letters created networks globally ideas for new ideas. Letter writing was an essential tool in the way academies, universities, societies, individuals and sometimes rulers managed their work, lives, friendships, and sometimes empires. The great innovation of EE was to collect and make available in digital and cross-searchable form the best available critical editions of eighteenth-century letters. These include the seminal correspondences of figures like Locke, Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau, among many others. Conceived by our former French tutorial fellow, Professor Nicholas Cronk, Director of the Voltaire Foundation, and Robert Darnton, the distinguished Harvard historian, and funded originally by the Mellon Foundation, EE is now distributed by Oxford University Press and located in the Centre for Digital Scholarship in the Bodleian Library.

Andrew will work together with an excellent team of four expert colleagues at the CDS. He is thrilled as an Enlightenment scholar with an interest in Digital Humanities to have been selected for this role in keeping EE at the forefront of new scholarship.