Office Hours
Fall 2025: Wednesdays, 3:00 - 5:00 pm, and by appointment. Please book an appointment here.
Education
Ph.D. – Stanford University
B.A. – Trinity University
Interests and Research
Charly Coleman, professor, specializes in the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with a particular emphasis on the intersections between religion, philosophy, and political economy. His latest monograph, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021; short-listed for the Kenshur Prize), uncovers a distinctly Catholic ethic of commodity culture that—in contrast to Weber’s famous “Protestant ethic”—privileged the marvelous over the mundane, consumption over production, and the pleasures of enjoyment over the rigors of delayed gratification. He is also the author of The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2014; winner of the 2016 Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies), which examines the relationship between personhood and property through the study of a culture of dispossession that drew together heretical mystics and radical materialists during the long eighteenth century. His research on selfhood, political economy, and economic theology has appeared in The Journal of Modern History, Modern Intellectual History, French Historical Studies, French History, Aeon, and various edited volumes.
He is currently at work on three new book projects. Money and Martyrs is a sequel to The Spirit of French Capitalism that extends the history of economic theology to debates over the fate of ecclesiastical property, paper currency, and civic religion during the French Revolution. The Enlightenment and the Politics of Resacralization, under contract as a volume in The Oxford History of Political Thought, explores the ways in which eighteenth-century political and economic thought emerged out of, and remained beholden to, problematics that Enlightenment philosophers inherited from an array of theological traditions. Finally, he is completing a study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s formulation of antinomy as a structuring principle of political, economic, and psychic life and its influence on Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Courses
- Global Enlightenment
- Religion and Capitalism
- Rethinking Secularization in Early Modern Europe
- The European Enlightenment
- Politics of Terror: The French Revolution
- Early Modern France
- Composing the Self in Early Modern Europe
- Dissertation Prospectus Workshop
- Senior Thesis Seminar
- Contemporary Civilization I and II
- Historical Craft and Method
- Research Seminar for PhD Students
Fellowships and Awards
- Short List, Kenshur Prize, for The Spirit of French Capitalism
- Heyman Center Fellowship
- Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant
- Membership, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science
- President’s Global Innovation Fund, Columbia University, Enhancing the Research Component of the History Major (co-principal investigator, Susan Pedersen)
- Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies, for The Virtues of Abandon
- Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund Fellowship
- Marjorie Farrar Award, Society for French Historical Studies
- Mellon Dissertation Fellowship
- Bourse Chateaubriand, Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France aux États-Unis
- Centennial Teaching Award, Stanford University
Publications
Books
The Enlightenment and the Politics of Resacralization (1710-1795), Volume 8 of The Oxford History of Political Thought, edited by Mark Bevir (Oxford University Press, under contract).
The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021).
The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2014).
Articles and Chapters
With Charles Walton, “Abstract and Embodied: The Political Economy of the French Revolution,” French History 38, no. 1 (March 2024): 41-57.
“A Gospel of Enjoyment,” Aeon, June 30, 2023.
“From Political Culture to Economic Theology,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas, ed. Stefanos Geroulanos and Gisèle Sapiro (Routledge, 2023), 172-184.
Response to Gail Bossenga, review of The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment, by Charly Coleman, H-France Review 22, no. 49 (April 2022): 1-7.
“Diderot, the Self, and the Science of Dreaming,” in The Self: A History, ed. Patricia Kitcher (Oxford University Press, 2021), 212-232.
“The Spirit of Speculation: John Law and Economic Theology in the Age of Lights,” French Historical Studies 42, 2 (April 2019): 203-238.
“Enlightenment in the Shadows: Mysticism, Materialism, and the Dream State in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Origins of Rationality, ed. Anton Matysin and Dan Edelstein (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 247-267.
“The Economy of the Mysteries: Administering Sacramental Wealth in the Age of Lights,” Occasional Papers, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Paper Number 61 (May 2018).
“The Vagaries of Disenchantment: God, Matter, and Mammon in the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Intellectual History 14, 3 (November 2017): 869-881.
“Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Brewer (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 105-121.
“Playing God,” Forum on Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge, The Immanent France, Social Science Research Council (November 2014).
“Resacralizing the Self: Mysticism, Materialism, and Personhood in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France: Fragments of Religion, ed. Sanja Perovic (Continuum, 2012), 83-103.
“Resacralizing the World: The Fate of Secularization in Enlightenment Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History 82 (June 2010): 368-395.
“The Value of Dispossession: Rethinking Discourses of Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century France,” Modern Intellectual History 2, 3 (November 2005): 299-326.
Book Reviews
Review of A History of Economic Thought in France: Political Economy in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Gilbert Faccarello and Claire Silvant. H-France Review (in press).
Review of Determinism and Enlightenment, by Ruggero Sciuto. The Journal of Modern History (in press).
Review of The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, by Colin Jones. Common Knowledge 30, no. 2 (May 2024): 199-201.
Review of Catholiques et économistes: Leurs controverses depuis la Révolution, by François Etner. H-France Review 23, no. 189 (November 2023): 1-6.
Review of A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, by Ronald Schechter. The Journal of Modern History 92, no. 1 (March 2020): 195-196.
Review of The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property, by Rafe Blaufarb. The Journal of Modern History 90, no. 2 (June 2018): 448-450.
Review of The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, by Anton Matytsin. H-France Review 17, no. 178 (October 2017): 1-6.
Review of Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre, by Jonathan Israel. The American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (October 2016): 1366-1367.
Review of The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment, by Liana Vardi. The Journal of Modern History 85, no. 3 (September 2013): 687-689.
Review of Au prisme de Rousseau: Usages politiques contemporains, by Céline Spector. The Journal of Modern History 85, no. 2 (June 2013): 448-450.
Review of The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century, by Jerrold Seigel. European History Quarterly 39, no. 2 (April 2009): 359-360.
Review of The Nature of Rousseau’s Rêveries: Physical, Human, Aesthetic, edited by John C. O’Neal. H-France Review 9, no. 40 (March 2009): 156-161.
Columbia University