Education
Habilitation - Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV 1994
Ph.D. - Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV 1987
B.A. - Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV 1979

Interests and Research

Pierre Force, Professor of French and History, received his academic training in France, where he was a fellow of the École normale supérieure. He first came to the United States in 1984 as a lecturer at Yale University, and he joined the Columbia faculty in 1987. He began serving as Dean of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2011. His field of research is seventeenth and eighteenth-century intellectual history. He is the author of Le Problème herméneutique chez Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1989), Molière ou Le Prix des choses (Paris: Nathan, 1994), and Self-Interest before Adam Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2003; paperback, 2007). His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals including History and Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Economy, Critique, Romanic Review, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Yale French Studies, and the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. Force received the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award in 2005 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2009. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Paris VII, Paris XIII, and the École normale supérieure. His teaching interests include the history of hermeneutics, the philosophy of history, and the development of moral and political thought in early modern Europe.

Affiliations

Member, scientific council, Institute for Advanced Study, Paris
Member, advisory board, Maison Française, Columbia University
Member, Société d’histoire littéraire de la France
Referee for Romanic Review; Journal of the History of Ideas; The Historical Journal; The Review of Politics; The Journal of Politics; The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought.