Geoffrey Turnovsky

Prof. Turnovsky is an Associate Professor and Chair of the French & Italian Studies Department. He specializes in the literary and cultural history of early modern France and Europe, with an emphasis on print culture, early modern media, the profession of authorship, and on readers and publics in the 17th and 18th centuries. His book, The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime, appeared in 2010. His articles -- on writers  and the commercial literary market; and on readers -- have appeared in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (SVEC); Studies in Eighteenth‑Century Culture; Revue de synthèse; Modern Language Quarterly; Romanic Review; Les dossiers du Grihl; and French Historical Studies.

Turnovsky's current research (representative samples here and here) explores the development of new paradigms of absorptive, moralized reading in early modern France and Europe, in light of the expansion, starting in the 17th century, of a new commercial public for printed texts, shaped by the marketing of reading as a preeminently non‑commercial, ethically beneficial, individualizing activity.

Read more about Professor Turnovsky's work here.