Chad CórdovaAssistant ProfessorFrench

PhD, Princeton University, 2018

Chad Córdova (PhD, Princeton University, 2018) works on philosophy, literature, aesthetics, and the history of science and medicine, in early modern and 20th-century France. Sub-fields include: continental thought and critical theory; the history of psychopathology (especially concerning melancholia and depression); psychoanalysis; ecophilosophy; posthumanism and animal studies; and media studies. He is affiliated with the Psychoanalytic Studies Program (PSP) and Human Health at Emory.

Research projects include: a study of philosophies and practices of natural and artful spontaneity and (a)teleology (Aristotle; Rabelais; Montaigne; da Vinci; Descartes; Pascal; Diderot; Rousseau; Kant; Nietzsche; Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty).

He is also at work on a critical-philosophical genealogy of theories, treatments, and politics of melancholia and depression—in medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, visual and literary arts, philosophy, and ecopsychology.

His PhD thesis studied the history and dialectics of French philosophical (anti)humanism — from Montaigne to Althusser —, arguing that early modern philosophical conflicts are crucial to understanding 20th-century French philosophy and theory. Much of his work and his teaching is committed to critical and comparative dialogue between the early modern period and 20th-21st-century philosophical and critical theoretical discourses.

2020: “Grace and Beauty: On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience (Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Bouhours, Kant),” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, XLVII: 92 (2020), pp. 27-45: https://elibrary.narr.digital/article/10.2357/PFSCL-2020-0002

2019: “Writing, Experience, and Literary Experience in Montaigne’s Essays and Sartre’s Nausea,” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, 57 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1590/2316-4018572  

2019: “‘Mais ôtez leur divertissement, vous les verrez sécher d’ennui’: Pascal and the Pictorial Tradition of Melancholy,” Biblio 17 vol. 219 / Creation, Re-creation, and Entertainment: Early Modernity and Postmodernity (Tübingen: Narr, 2019), pp. 301-22: https://elibrary.narr.digital/book/99.125005/9783823392972

2017/19: “Pascal and Melancholy,” Modern Intellectual History (2017), pp. 1-35: https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924431700052; Print: MIH, 16: 2 (2019), pp. 339-73. 

2012: “Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne: Describing and Painting Existence,” Circé. Histoires, Cultures & Sociétés, 1 (2012): http://www.revue-circe.uvsq.fr/merleau-ponty-and-cezanne-describing-and-painting-existence/