Edward Langille

Edward M. Langille has been a professor of Modern Languages at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, since 1989. He specializes in Enlightenment studies, and is one of Canada’s leading experts on Voltaire and his works. In 2004, he was named Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and in 2013 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for services to scholarship, education and culture. In 2016, Langille was named to a two-year term as the Jules Léger Research Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences at St FX. He was appointed in 2017 to a prestigious three-year position as contributing editor to The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies (YWMLS) He has conducted extensive research on the sources and origins of Voltaire's 1759 satiric masterpiece Candide. He argues that Candide draws on Pierre-Antoine de La Place's 1750 novel, Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouvé, a French adaptation of Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones.