Pierre-Héli Monot is Professor of Transnational American Studies (Aesthetics, Political Theory, and Public Humanities) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Since 2020, he has been the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant The Arts of Autonomy: Pamphleteering, Popular Philology and the Public Sphere. The project examines the global spread of polemical literature since the Enlightenment and the development of political agency among popular readerships.

His major field of study is the intersection of political theory and aesthetics. He is currently working on the transformations of the concept of “universality” during the 20^th century. This project adopts a broad perspective on the political history of universality and sets out to examine and historicize “universalist” claims in the public sphere and their cultural, i.e., non-universal underpinnings. While the critique of universalist reason and arguments has been a highly influential position in the humanities and social sciences since the early 1980s, a massive resurgence of arguments claiming either universal validity or universal applicability has been well underway since the early 2010s. This project historicizes these standpoints in a longue durée and global perspective. Its goal is firmly located in international history and intellectual history.

Pierre-Héli Monot has held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard University, Brown University, King’s College London, and New York University. His most recent publications include a monograph on conceptions of revolutionary politics among the educated bourgeoisie (Hundert Jahre Zärtlichkeit: Surrealismus, Bürgertum, Revolution, 2024), an essay on the place of historicism in the Culture Wars of the 1980s (“Three Historicist Comments: Otium, Critique, Revolutionary Reformism, or What Was Interesting About the Culture Wars”, Minnesota Review, 2024), and an essay on popular protest in the 2010s (“On Neoclassicism”, 2022). A brief history of polemical literature is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.