Professor Nicholas Cronk, Professor of French Literature and Director of the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by McGill University. He also had the honour of giving the Convocation Address to the Arts Graduates in the presence of the Chancellor John McCall MacBain.
Professor Cronk is at once one of the world’s pre-eminent Enlightenment scholars while standing at the forefront of digital humanities technology. His work has been and remains crucial to the development of digital humanities research and is broadening our understanding of 18th-century civilization. Professor Cronk was the general editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire, the first critical edition of the totality of Voltaire’s writings in the original French, arranged chronologically in 205 volumes containing book-length introductions, scholarly variants, and extensive notes. He is now leading the planning of the digital edition of Voltaire’s complete writings as part of a new initiative titled Digital Enlightenment. Professor Cronk is also the creator of Electronic Enlightenment, a digital collection of 18th-century correspondence, which includes more than 79,000 letters and 8,000 correspondents. It is regarded as the world’s most important online collection of edited correspondence from the early-modern period, and has won the Prize for Digital Resources of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
For his groundbreaking work in critical editing and digital humanities research and its application to the study of Enlightenment texts, Nicholas Cronk has won numerous accolades and was named Officier des Palmes académiques in 2001 and Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002. His work has been and remains crucial to the development of digital humanities research and is broadening our understanding of 18th-century civilization.