Postdoctoral Scholar—Teaching Fellow
Robert Decker is a Postdoctoral Scholar—Teaching Fellow in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Southern California, where he studies the literature, thought, and visual culture of the Francophone Caribbean. His current book project explores the intersections cultural practice and anticolonial politics in contemporary Antillean visual culture. More broadly, his work interrogates the interrelation of history, geography and cultural politics in the neo- and postcolonial Antilles. His research interests also include bande dessinée, public history, and legacies of the Haitian Revolution in and beyond the Caribbean. He teaches courses on French language, francophone literature, bande dessinée (comics), and cinema.
Postdoctoral Scholar—Teaching Fellow
Ruggero Sciuto is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of French and Italian. His research focuses on eighteenth-century French literature and culture, particularly the works of Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d’Holbach, and Voltaire. He is the author of a monograph on the theory of determinism jointly advanced by Diderot and d’Holbach (Determinism and Enlightenment: The Collaboration of Diderot and d’Holbach) and is currently working on a second book to understand how d’Holbach’s authorial strategies affected the reception of his (political) ideas. He is a collaborator on both the Oxford edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire and the Edizione Nazionale del Carteggio di Lodovico Antonio Muratori, and the director of the critical edition of d’Holbach’s complete works (Digital d’Holbach). As part of Digital d’Holbach, he is currently working on editions of two key Enlightenment texts: the Lettres à Eugénie and Le Bon Sens.
Ruggero has a strong secondary interest in diplomatic history. His work on Franco-Italian diplomatic relations has appeared in premier journals, including the Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France and Archivio Storico Italiano, and his edition of the Représentation aux Etats de l’Empire, an unknown diplomatic manuscript by Voltaire, was published in 2020 in the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire. He has also edited with Dr Florian Kühnel a special issue of the International History Review on ‘Gender and Diplomacy in the Early Modern Period’.