Dr James Hanrahan is a graduate of University College Cork (BCL, Law and French, 1998-2002) and the University of Edinburgh (PhD, 2003-2007). His doctoral study was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and included one year as a pensionnaire étranger at the Ecole normale supérieure (rue d'Ulm). He worked as a Lecturer in French at NUI Galway (2006-2008) and NUI Maynooth (2008-2010) before taking up the post of Ussher Assistant Professor in Eighteenth-Century French Studies at Trinity in 2010. He was a Voltaire Foundation Visiting Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, in January-February 2008 and was awarded an IRCHSS CARA Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2010. He has been a member of the executive committee of ADEFFI since 2009 and is currently Vice-President of the Association.

My research focuses on the literature, history, politics and culture of Enlightenment France. My doctoral research focused on Voltaire and his relationship with the supreme courts of ancien régime France. I contribute as an external editor to The Complete Works of Voltaire, published by the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford. I have written critical introductions to a range of Voltaire's shorter works and have worked as part of a team of academics annotating the definitive editions of the Essai sur les mœurs and Questions sur l'Encyclopédie. I am also interested in and have published on the concept of public opinion and its impact on politics and society, from the eighteenth century up to the present. I am currently preparing a critical edition of Voltaire's Précis du siècle de Louis XV and, in parallel, working on the concept of origins in Enlightenment thought.