{"id":87,"date":"2017-10-04T20:03:46","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T20:03:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-french\/facultystaff\/andrewbilling\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T16:19:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T16:19:14","slug":"andrewbilling","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/facultystaff\/andrewbilling\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Billing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Billing\u2019s principal research interests include the French\u00a0Enlightenment, eighteenth-century political and moral philosophy and political economy, Rousseau,\u00a018th-century French literature, French imperialism in the Pacific, early science fiction, and critical theory.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Originally from Aotearoa\/New Zealand, Professor Billing has a secondary research specialization in francophone literature from the Pacific region. He has published and presented at conferences in this area, in particular on the fiction of Titaua Peu.<\/span><\/p>\n

At ÈÕº«¾«Æ·, he has taught courses on the French Revolution and eighteenth-century French political ideas; on the animal\/human distinction in the French Enlightenment; science fiction and technology in French literature and film; francophone literature from the Asia\/Pacific region; and on colonial and postcolonial writing from Aotearoa\/New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawai\u2019i. He has also collaborated with a student on translations into English of articles from Diderot and D\u2019Alembert\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Encyclop\u00e9die.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

His book, <\/span>Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>(Routledge, 2024), explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors\u2014Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and R\u00e9tif de La Bretonne\u2014constructed a \u201cpolitical zoology\u201d in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology.<\/span><\/p>\n

Recent publications include \u201c<\/span>Mercier\u2019s Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in <\/span>L\u2019An 2440, r\u00eave s\u2019il en fut jamais<\/span><\/i><\/a>,<\/span><\/i>\u201d in <\/span>Eighteenth-Century Fiction <\/span><\/i>35, no. 4 (2023); and \u201cPolitical Right, Political Economy, and the Economic Cycle in Rousseau, Quesnay, and Condillac,\u201d in <\/span>Frameworks of Time in Rousseau, <\/span><\/i>eds. Masano Yamashita and Jason Neidleman<\/span><\/a> (Routledge, 2024).<\/span><\/p>\n

With Professor Juliette Cherbuliez of the University of Minnesota, he edited a special edition of\u00a0<\/span>L\u2019Esprit Cr\u00e9ateur,\u00a0<\/span><\/i>titled\u00a0<\/span>Paris, Imagined Capital: Economic Transition and Modernity (17<\/span><\/i>th<\/span><\/i>\u00a0to 19<\/span><\/i>th<\/span><\/i>\u00a0Centuries).\u00a0<\/span><\/i>He also participated in and helped lead a workshop on the Abb\u00e9 Raynal\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Histoire philosophique et politique des \u00e9tablissements et du commerce des Europ\u00e9ens dans les deux Indes,\u00a0<\/span><\/i>hosted by the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World at the University of Minnesota.<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor Billing received his BA from the University of Otago,\u00a0MA from the University of Canterbury and his PhD from the University of California, Irvine, with a doctoral dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2019s political fictions.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31,"template":"","class_list":["post-87","profile","type-profile","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":785,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/87\/revisions\/785"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}