The Honors College

Honors College Faculty

Email: rzaretsky@uh.edu
Phone: 713.743.9018

Robert Zaretsky has a joint appointment between the Honors College and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages (MCL) in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. He teaches a variety of Honors and MCL courses, ranging from the histories of existentialism and terrorism to the histories of Paris and Berlin. He is the author of several books, including Nîmes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Gard, 1938-1944 (Penn State University, 1995), Cock and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue (Nebraska, 2004), Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (Cornell, 2010), A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (Harvard, 2013), Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard, 2015), Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher and the Fate of the Enlightenment (Harvard, 2019), The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago, 2021), and Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague (Chicago, 2022).

He is also the co-author, with John Scott, of The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding (Yale, 2009) and with Alice Conklin and Sarah Fishman, France and its Empire Since 1870 (Oxford, 2010). His new book Chasing Happiness: Stendhal and the Art of Living, will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2027. 

Zaretsky is a columnist for the Jewish Forward and a frequent contributor to many newspapers and journals, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Le Monde, Houston Chronicle, Foreign Affairs, American Scholar, Foreign Policy, World Politics Review, The Atlantic, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, his master’s in history from the University of Vermont, and his doctorate in history from the University of Virginia.