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Professor Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and Professor, by courtesy, of History and of Political Science.

Born in Ithaca, NY, he moved to Geneva, Switzerland when he was eleven. After attending the Collège Calvin, he studied literature at the University of Geneva; he then returned to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his PhD in 2004. He joined the Department of French & Italian at Stanford that same year.

He works for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities (DH). He is the author of four books: the first on French revolutionary Terror; the second on the genealogy of the Enlightenment; the third on the early-modern history of human rights; and he recently completed an intellectual history of revolution from Thucydides to Lenin, entitled The Revolution to Come.

He has edited or co-edited seven volumes of essays, was a PI for the "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project, and the founding faculty director of the "Humanities + Design" research lab at CESTA.

He often teaches courses on the literature, philosophy, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century French novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; French intellectual culture (“Coffee & Cigarettes”); liberal education ("Education as Self-Fashioning"); and historical networks ("Networks: Ecological, Revolutionary, and Digital"). Recently, most of his teaching as been for the COLLEGE program.

Angela has a passion for historical and vernacular social dance, and has taught and performed throughout North America, as well as in Paris, Rome, Prague, Venice, St. Petersburg, and more. She majored in HumBio and received a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Education, but her greatest claim to fame is that she is the first person to graduate from Stanford with a minor in dance. After a very full career as a health educator, Angela is back on the Farm to build a financial wellness program for students.