Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French at Stanford University, where he is also a professor, by courtesy, of History and Political Science, as well as a senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution. Trained as a literary scholar, Edelstein works primarily at the intersection of literature, history, and political thought. 

He is the author of four books: The Terror of Natural Right (2009), The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (2010), On the Spirit of Rights  (2018), and most recently The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (2025). He has edited seven volumes of essays, including Scripting Revolution (2015), with Keith M. Baker; Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (2020), with Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley; and most recently a volume of the Cambridge History of Rights (2025) with Jennifer Pitts. 

He is the faculty director of COLLEGE, Stanford’s required first-year curriculum, the co-director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, and the co-faculty director of ePluribus Stanford, the university’s constructive dialogue initiative. He received the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006, the university's highest teaching honor, and the Dean's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011. He is currently working on a history of the idea of Western culture.