Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 2014
A.B., Washington University in St. Louis, French and Classics, 2006
Andrea Gadberry
Associate Professor
Literature and philosophy; comparative early modern and Enlightenment studies; political theory; genre; poetics; psychoanalysis; critical theory.
Andrea Gadberry’s research focuses on literature and philosophy in early modern and Enlightenment Europe with additional interests in poetics, political theory, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.
Her first book Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking (University of Chicago Press 2020), defends the “resultless enterprises” of poetry and thinking by enlisting an unlikely ally in its cause: René Descartes. Against the historical accusation that Descartes’ philosophy “slashed poetry’s throat,” Cartesian Poetics argues that the resources of early modern poetry and rhetoric help make Descartes’ thinking possible — and sayable.
She is currently at work on a second book project, Compossible Literature: On Uncertain Correlations, which examines how theodicy, or the problem of evil, is literary criticism’s problem.
At NYU, she holds a joint appointment at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study.