Marcus Keller

In my research and teaching, I focus on 16th- and 17th-century French literature and culture with a special interest in aesthetics and politics/ethics and the early modern as the first global era. I am currently finishing a book manuscript entitledThinking through the Turk: Islam and the Ottoman Empire as Paradigms in Renaissance France, an exploration of French orientalist discourses of the sixteenth century (literature, political discourses, cosmographical writings, and travel narratives). Other research and teaching interests of mine include early modern concepts of race, the rise of a national and European consciousness in early modern French texts, and the experience of the first age of globalization in the sixteenth century and its representation in text and image.

More recently, I have also begun work in a secondary field of research on postcolonial memory in Belgium and the Congo as part of my wider interest in contemporary Belgian literature and culture.

In connection with my research for Thinking through the Turk, I edited "The Turk of Early Modern France" (L'Esprit Créateur 53.4, 2013) and co-edited the collection The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Since 2012, I am also the co-editor of the series "Rethinking the Early Modern" (Northwestern University Press)