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University Associate Professor, Department of French, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge
Dr John Leigh is a University Associate Professor in the Department of French, within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century French thought and literature. He is the author of Touché : The Duel in Literature (Harvard UP, 2015), The Search for Enlightenment (Duckworth, 1999) and Voltaire's Sense of History (Voltaire Foundation, 2004). He is also the editor of Beaumarchais, The Figaro Plays (Everyman, 1998). He is currently writing a biography of Voltaire.
As an undergraduate, he read French and German at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. There he stayed as a doctoral student, completing a thesis on Voltaire's response to history in his fictional works. He became a University Lecturer and Fellow of his Fitzwilliam in 1995 where, ever since, he has been a Director of Studies.