Todd Reeser

Todd Reeser is professor of French, with a secondary appointment in Women’s Studies, at the University of Pittsburgh. During academic year 2012-13, he was a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Reeser’s research interests lie largely in the areas of gender and sexuality, especially in the Renaissance, and he is especially interested in the various intersections between the ancient world, the Renaissance, and modern theoretical concepts. His first book Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (2006) proposes a model of masculinity and alterity based on an Aristotelian notion of moderation. His second book, Masculinities in Theory (2010), provides a series of theoretical models for considering the growing field of masculinity studies from a literary/cultural perspective, especially as inflected by post-structuralist thought. His next monograph “Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Homosexuality in the Renaissance” (under contract at the University of Chicago Press) deals with the complicated question of the reception of Platonic sexuality in philosophical and fictional texts of the European Renaissance, from Leonardo Bruni in the early 15th century to Michel de Montaigne in the late 16th. Comparative and comprehensive in scope, the project studies how hermeneutics and sexuality do and do not dovetail in a number of textual-sexual contexts.