Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Research Interests and Selected Publications

Kent Wright received his Ph.D. in History in 1990 from the University of Chicago.  His research and writing has been devoted to three related subjects – French political thought in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the wider history of the Enlightenment and its place in modern thought and historiography in general.  He is the author of A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: the Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, 1997), and of essays on French republicanism, Montesquieu and Rousseau, historical writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and on Ernst Cassirer and Carl Becker.  He is currently editing a volume of essays on the Enlightenment for Blackwell's New Histories series, and working on two book projects: a study of the Enlightenment in twentieth-century thought, entitled A Bright, Clear Mirror; and a study of Montesquieu's political thought in its historical context.

Teaching Interests and Courses

Professor Wright taught courses in Western Civilization and Social Thought in the College at Chicago for seven years.  He joined the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University in 1994, for which he taught a wide range of courses in cultural and intellectual history, including surveys of Western art and literature, the history of psychoanalysis and modern critical and literary theory.  In 2003, Wright moved to the Department of History, where he has taught surveys in Western, European, and Global history, and courses and seminars in the Enlightenment, and the French, American, and Latin American Revolutions; and directed graduate work on French and modern European intellectual history.

Professional Service Activities

Professor Wright was Director of Graduate Studies in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program for four years.  Currently, he is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History; he also serves Program Advisor in History for the Barrett Honors College.  He is a past Vice-President of the Society for French History Studies, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.