Overview
Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Romance Studies. He received his BA in French and Art History from NYU and his PhD in French from Princeton University. Prior to coming to Cornell, he was Assistant Professor of French at Emory University in Atlanta from 2018 to 2024. His teaching and research focus on the complex affinities between premodern and contemporary currents of continental thought, especially in aesthetics, ecological philosophy, ethics, and psychopathology.
His first monograph — Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France — will be published by Northwestern University Press in spring 2025 in the series “Rethinking the Early Modern.” The book shows how ancient and early modern ideas of art and nature are crucial to current attempts to think and live beyond the ecocidal metaphysics of the “world picture.” Tracing a new trajectory of posthumanist thought across a wide range of texts — from Aristotelian physics to early modern French literature and philosophy (Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau), and from Kantian aesthetics to late Heidegger, deconstruction, and avant-garde ecological theories — the book responds to the ongoing crisis of the humanities by proposing an anachronic mode of rereading. Abandoning historicism, it brings forth the “new” and still-radical potentialities of putatively “old” or “obsolete” texts.
He is now at work on a second book project—an experimental study, or essay—on Montaigne in the context of recent trends in theory. The book attempts to understand the coming contemporaneity of Montaigne’s Essays by heeding their modes of resonance (and dissonance) with new ideas in fields such as posthumanist ethics, political theory, speculative realism, decolonial anthropology, ecological thought, and indigenous studies.
Another main research project is devoted to the long history — and many theories, guises, and artistic expressions across the world — of what is called “depression.”
Research Focus
French thought (esp. 1500–1800)
Continental philosophy
Deconstruction
Posthumanism
Plant studies
Animal studies
Ecological thought
Aesthetics
Indigenous studies
History of psychopathology
Psychoanalysis
Publications
Selected Publications:
“Responsibility to Other Creatures: Of Posthumanist Humanitas, in Montaigne,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 46, special issue, “The environmental question” (2023): 303–40. https://doi.org/10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-16497-5.p.0303
“From the Dialectic of Power to the Posthumanist Sublime: Rereading Kant in a Time of Climate Catastrophe,” Environmental Philosophy 20:2 (2023): 215–36. https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil2023919134
“Life in the Grotto: Montaigne and the Meaning of Posthumanism,” Exemplaria 35:2 (2023): 163–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2023.2237831
“Pascal and Melancholy,” Modern Intellectual History (2017): 1–35: https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924431700052X – In print: MIH 16: 2 (2019): 339–73
