Andrei Pesic

Andrei Pesic is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern France, with a special interest in the arts and economic thought. 
 
His current book manuscript, entitled The Enlightenment in Concert: Music, Markets, and Inadvertent Secularization (under advance contract) uses the history of music to reexamine key questions in the history of the Enlightenment. It shows how concert series in eighteenth-century Europe brought sacred music into the marketplace for entertainment. The transformations resulting from this mixture of art, religion, and commerce illuminate how a process of secularization might emerge inadvertently due to competitive market pressures rather than as the result of an intentional project.
 
Other current projects include an intellectual history of the concept of competition and its use in annual painting displays in Paris (the salons) in the eighteenth century.
 
His research has been supported by the ACLS-Mellon Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), and the France-Stanford Center. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Andrei was a postdoctoral researcher at the New York Public Library (2015-16). 
 
Andrei earned his Ph.D. in history in 2015 from Princeton University under the supervision of Anthony Grafton, David Bell, and Wendy Heller. Prior to that, he earned an MSc at Oxford University in Economic and Social History (2008), where he held the Michael Von Clemm Fellowship, and an A.B. from Harvard in Economics (2007).