Professor William Paulson

William Paulson, Edward Lorraine Walter Collegiate Professor of French, retired from the Department and the University in 2021.  One of the longest-serving members of the Department, Bill has been a highly regarded teacher and mentor and a much appreciated colleague who made an exceptional contribution to RLL and U-M overall.

Bill earned his B.A. in French and mathematics from Rockford College in 1976 and his Ph.D. in French from Princeton in 1981, with a dissertation on blindness in eighteenth-century French literature.  He began his teaching career in 1981 as an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College and in 1986 joined the University of Michigan faculty where he spent the remainer of his career.  A scholar of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as of relations between culture, science, and technology, Bill has published many books and articles in those fields, including Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France (1987), The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (1988), Sentimental Education: The Complexity of Disenchantment (1992), and Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities (2001).  In this latter work, he makes a powerful case for the importance of the humanities in a world of technological and environmental change, a case that remains urgent and compelling today.  His recent work has built upon this foundation, exploring the temporal situation of human thought in the age of digital communication and automation.  He has also translated the work of the philosopher of science Michel Serres.