Arnaud Wydler

President

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Arnaud Wydler is a teacher-researcher at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). His research focuses on seventeenth-century French literature, with particular emphasis on the intersections between religious eloquence, worldly culture, and social practices of speech. His forthcoming monograph, based on his doctoral dissertation, La Chaire et le Monde. La rhétorique du sermon d’apparat en France (1660-1720), will be published by Droz in autumn 2026. He also co-edited, with Agnès Cousson, the recently published collective volume L’Inscription du fait religieux dans les écrits personnels en France au XVIIe siècle, issued by Classiques Garnier. In December 2025, together with Joy Palacios, Corinne Bayerl, and Anne Régent-Susini, he organised the international conference "Religion et plaisir (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) / Religion and Pleasure (16th-18th century)", which explored the place of pleasure in early modern literature and culture through the moral and religious frameworks that shaped and regulated it. As a postdoctoral researcher within the SNSF project "Éros galant" (dir. Claude Bourqui), he also investigates representations of eroticism and sexuality in France during the second half of the seventeenth century, focusing in particular on the tensions between traditional morality, galant culture, and libertine discourse that characterised the period.