Professor David Adams
Phone: +44 (0)161 275 3234
Email: david.adams@manchester.ac.uk
Office Hours: Thursday 1-2; other times
by appointment
Research
Research interests
- French Enlightenment Thought
- French Illustrated books of the 18th century
- Material bibliography
Collaboration
I am a member of the conseil scientifique of the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, which is editing the Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. Since 2008, I have been a Research Fellow at the Foundation, with responsibility for the bibliographical sections of each volume of the Oeuvres completes.
In September 2009, I shall be in Amsterdam, as a member of the jury appointed by the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers to award its Breslauer Prize for the best bibliography published in the last four years.
Externally-funded research
In 2003 I was awarded £13,000 by the AHRB to conduct a research project on the 18th-century illustrations to La Fontaine's Contes et Nouvelles en vers
Research students
Thesis successfully completed in 2005:
- Mr Jon Hensher - 'Orlando Espatriato: French Illustrated Editions of Ariosto, 1775-1879'
Thesis successfully completed in 2006:
- Mr Bob Gillan - 'Transgression in French Literature from Sade to Bataille'
Thesis successfully completed in 2008:
- Ms. Louise Crowther - 'Diderot and Lessing as exemplars of a post-Spinozist mentality'
Thesis to be submitted in September 2009:
- Mr Matthew Yeo: 'The acquisition of books by Chetham's Library 1655-1685: a case-study in the distribution and reception of texts in the English provinces in the seventeenth century.'
This a collaborative doctoral programme, supervised in conjunction with Chetham's Library, Manchester.
Publications
Selected Books (authored)
- Book illustration, Taxes and Propaganda. The Fermiers généraux edition of La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers of 1762 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2006).
- Denis Diderot: thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature and other philosophical works, edited with an introduction and notes by David Adams (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999).
- Bibliographie d'ouvrages français en forme de dialogue 1700-1750 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992)
- Diderot, Dialogue and Debate (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1986)
Books (edited)
- 'Text, Image and contemporary society': a special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31:3 (Wiley-Blackwell's, 2008)
- Print and Power in France and England, 1500-1800' (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006).Edited with Professor Adrian Armstrong.
- Text and Image: Studies in the French Illustrated Book from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, special number of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 81 (3) 1999. Edited with Professor Adrian Armstrong.
Some Recent Academic Articles
- Illustration and interpretation: the frontispiece to Marmontel's Bélisaire', Studies presented to John Renwick, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: the Voltaire Foundation, 2008), 35-46.
- 'Diderot', in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, edited by Tom Flynn (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), p.262-264.
- 'Diderot, Dentistry and British Politics: two neglected Pamphlets', in British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Kathleen Hardesty Doig and Dorothy Medlin (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), p.206-226.
- 'The Système figuré des Connaissances humaines and the structure of Knowledge in the Encyclopédie', in Ordering the World, ed. Diana Donald and Frank O'Gorman (London: Macmillan, 2006), p.190-215.
- 'Slavery in the Encyclopédie' [in] The Enterprise of Enlightenment: a Tribute to David Williams from his Friends (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), p.127-40.
- 'Politics and illustration; the lower classes as depicted in the 'Fermiers généraux' edition of La Fontaine's Contes of 1762', British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26 (2) (2003), 155-66.
- 'Jean-Baptiste de Secondat's marginalia in Boulainvilliers's Etat de la France', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 83, no.1 (2002),103-19.
- 'La Gazette manuscrite (Fr. Mss. 42-51) de la John Rylands Library', [in] Répertoire des Nouvelles à la main, ed. François Moureau (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000).
- 'Theme and technique in the 'Oudry' edition of La Fontaine's Fables' [in] Text and Image', special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 81, no. 3 (2000), 361-84.
- 'The Encyclopédie, travel and empirical discovery', [in] L'Invitation au Voyage, a Festschrift for Professor Peter France (Oxford: the Voltaire Foundation, for the University of Edinburgh, 2000, p.149-56).
- 'Un ouvrage anti-philosophique inconnu', Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, 29 (2000), 179-82.
- Four articles in The Literary Encyclopedia: Denis Diderot; the Encyclopédie; Le Neveu de Rameau; Jacques le fataliste.
The Literary Encyclopedia provides author profiles, text profiles, topic essays and time lines in a series of user-friendly indexed databases. The homepage is at http://www.litencyc.com and the index of completed profiles is at http://www.litencyc.com/contents/contents.html.
Forthcoming
- Adams, David (forthcoming), Les illustrations de Candide dans les Romans et Contes de M. de Voltaire 1778 in Actes du colloque Les 250 ans de Candide (Oxford : the Voltaire Foundation, 2010)
Professional biography
- B.A. (Manchester), 1969
- M.A. (Manchester), 1971
- Ph.D (Manchester), 1979
- Lecturer in French, 1972-87
- Senior Lecturer in French, 1987-1995
- Reader in French, 1995-2005
- Professor of French Enlightenment Studies, 2005- present
Teaching Areas
Undergraduate
- 18th-century French theatre
- 18th-century French thought
- 18th-century French art
- French language
Post-graduate
MA
- Research Methods
- Diderot
- 18th-century French theatre
PhD
- Supervision as indicated above