Fayçal Falaky

Fayçal Falaky is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of French & Italian and Director of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Program. He specializes in eighteenth-century French literature, Enlightenment thought, political philosophy, and the history of ideas, with particular attention to the intellectual and cultural encounters between Europe and the Arab-Islamic world. His research explores questions of religion, colonialism, commerce, mobility, modernity, and cross-cultural representation in early modern and Enlightenment thought.

He is the author of Social Contract, Masochist Contract: Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau (SUNY Press, 2014) and co-editor of Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France (Bucknell University Press, 2021), Diderot et le paysage (Droz, 2022), and Diderot et l’archéologie (Classiques Garnier, 2024). Since 2022, he has served as co-editor, alongside Zeina Hakim, of Diderot Studies.

His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Journal of the History of Ideas, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, European Journal of Political Theory, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Small Axe. His work has addressed subjects including Wahhabism and the Enlightenment, representations of Islam in eighteenth-century Europe, North African captivity narratives, church bells and secularization, and Rousseau’s political imagination.

His current book project, The Great Acceleration: How Enlightenment Thought Rewired Stillness into Motion, examines the intellectual genealogy of modern acceleration and traces how Enlightenment thinkers transformed movement, circulation, and restless activity into signs of vitality, progress, and modern life.

Recent Publications

Diderot et l’archéologie, co-edited with Zeina Hakim and Lorenz Baumer (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024).

“France and the Invention of the Arabic Language,” in Imaginaires des langues anciennes et orientales dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, eds. Carole Boidin, Flora Champy, and Élise Pavy (Paris: Hermann, 2023).

“Rewinding the Sentiment,” in Frameworks of Time in Rousseau, eds. Jason Neidleman and Masano Yamashita (London and New York: Routledge, 2023).

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France, co-edited with Reginald McGinnis (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2021).

“The Cloche and its Critics: Muting the Church’s Voice in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Journal of the History of Ideas 81.2 (2020): 239–255.

“D’un déisme à l’autre: Le wahhabisme au temps des Lumières,” in Les Lumières, l’esclavage et l’idéologie coloniale, ed. Pascale Pellerin (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020), 131–152.