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.at the University of Houston. 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 or co-author of several books, including The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding (Yale 2009), Albert Camus: Elements to a Life (Cornell 2010), A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest of Meaning (Harvard 2013), Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard, 2016), 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, 2023). He is completing his new book, Chasing Happiness: Stendhal and the Art of Living, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026.

Zaretsky is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, Le Monde, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, Vox, and Atlantic Magazine. He is also a columnist for the Jewish Forward. He earned his bachelor’s in philosophy from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and his doctorate in history from the University of Virginia.