Dr. Falaky is an Associate Professor of French and is currently Chair of the Department of French and Italian and Director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Tulane University. His work focuses on eighteenth-century French literature and political thought, with a broader interest in how Enlightenment ideals of motion, speed, and vitality reshaped modern understandings of time, desire, and progress. In residence, he will be completing his book manuscript, The Great Acceleration: A Brief History of Motion, which explores how early modern thinkers displaced religious stillness with secular dynamism, laying the philosophical foundations for many of today’s ecological and psychological crises.