Nicholas Cronk - Curriculum Vitae#

French literature of the Ancien Régime

My early interests lay in the field of French literature of the Ancien Régime, in particular in aesthetic theory. Publications include a book based on my thesis, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (2002).

The Enlightenment, Voltaire, and the Complete works of Voltaire

My interests have since focused on the period of the Enlightenment, in particular on the figure of Voltaire. Within this broad field, I have worked as a textual scholar; as a literary critic; and as a historian of ideas.

In 2000, I became the director of the project to edit and publish the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Complete works of Voltaire), the first ever scholarly edition in French of the complete writings of Voltaire.

Apart from my work for the complete edition, I have published extensively on Voltaire, equally in French and English, including over 150 articles and a number of books and collected volumes. I have also published works designed to introduce Voltaire to a broader public, for example, Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), translated into Swedish, Korean and Chinese. Since 2010 I have been President of Société des études voltairiennes based at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Digital Humanities

I have also become active in the area of Digital Humanities. I was the creator of Electronic Enlightenment and its Principal Investigator (2000-2009). This digital resource, now regarded as a pioneering project in the field, remains by far the most important online collection of edited correspondence from the early modern period. Winner of BSECS Digital Prize in 2010.

I am now working on a new digital project, provisionally called Voltaire Online. Our aim is to reimagine the contents of the 205 print volumes of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire on a new platform that will both enable more sophisticated forms of searching and also allow us to communicate this work to new and broader audiences.

Major achievements

Electronic Enlightenment (https://www.e-enlightenment.com)

I created the project and was its sole Principal Investigator (2000 - 2009).

This digital collection of eighteenth-century correspondences began with the digitisation of the correspondences of Voltaire (ed. Th. Besterman) and of J.-J. Rousseau (ed. R. Leigh), comprising over 30,000 letters in total. Work then expanded to include other American, British and French correspondences. The innovative nature of this project is twofold: (1) we worked always from the best available critical editions, and digitised not only the texts of the letters, but also their full critical apparatus, making all this material fully cross-searchable; and (2) we pioneered a business model which invited different commercial academic presses to share their copyright material on a non-exclusive basis. After 2009, this project became a self-sustaining commercial enterprise. The dataset of Electronic Enlightenment, now distributed by Oxford University Press, currently includes over 67,000 letters, and over 8,000 correspondents, making it by far the most important online collection of edited correspondence from the early modern period. Winner of BSECS Digital Prize in 2010.

Œuvres complètes de Voltaire

This is the first ever complete scholarly edition of Voltaire’s works: all the editions that have appeared since his death in 1778 have been seriously incomplete and contained gross inaccuracies. The project began in 1968, and when I became General Editor in 2000, it had slowed down and was in peril of collapsing. This was a large and complex project to manage, involving over 120 international scholars. As General Editor, I managed the preparation of around 100 volumes. As an editor, I was personally responsible for a number of editions, including the Lettres sur les Anglais. The project reached a successful conclusion in 2022: the edition of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire is now complete in 205 print volumes. I am now leading the project to produce an innovative digital version of the complete works of Voltaire, using the 205 print volumes as a starting-point.