Anton M. Matytsin

Anton Matytsin is Associate Professor of history at the University of Florida. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015. Prior to coming to UF, Matytsin was Assistant Professor of History at Kenyon College and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He is the author of The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). He is also co-editor, with Dan Edelstein, of Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) with Jeffrey Burson, of The Age of Skepticism: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason (Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press, 2019). His research has focused on the intellectual history of France and the French-speaking world in the long eighteenth century. His first book, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (JHUP, 2016), explores the ways in which eighteenth-century thinkers responded to the challenges posed by the revival and spread of philosophical skepticism and details how the debates about the powers and limits of human understanding led to the making of a new conception of rationality that privileged practicable reason over speculative reason. His second monograph (in progress) is a history of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. This institution, established under Louis XIV in order to locate ancient monuments and inscriptions that could serve as models for commemorating the achievements of the Sun King, had a dramatic impact on the historical and political consciousness of Europe. The research conducted by the members of this group led to fundamental changes in the way Europeans understood the origins of their own Judaeo-Christian culture. Furthermore, the study of antiquity exposed readers to a variety of alternative models of social and political organization, destabilizing established assumptions about the proper nature of government. https://history.ufl.edu/directory/current-faculty/anton-matytsin/