Matthew Senior

My current research and upper-level teaching interests focus on representations of the natural world in early modern France. In my work on zoos, medical and religious practices, literature, and philosophy, I have been studying a major shift in knowledge and sensibilities toward nature during the period 1500-1800, as a Renaissance paradigm of relatedness to nature and microcosm was being replaced by a mechanistic, Cartesian world view.

I have edited three collections of essays on the history and philosophy of animality: Animots: Postanimality in French Thought (Yale French Studies, 127, 2015); A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (Berg, 2007); and Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History from the Middle Ages to the Present (Routledge, 1997) and contributed essays to these as well.

A related area of interest of mine is the process by which humans create themselves, mentally and symbolically, as human beings, a practice modern philosophers have called “supreme humanization” (Nietzsche), “hominisation” (Teilhard de Chardin), “anthropogenesis” (Giorgio Agamben), and “anthropotechnics” (Peter Sloterdijk).

This ties into my earlier research on the role of confession in the formation of the self in Western history, the subject of my first book: In the Grip of Minos: Confessional Discourse in Dante, Corneille, and Racine (Ohio State University Press, 1994).