Roger Maioli is an associate professor of English at the University of Florida. He specializes in the literary and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Britain and France, with a focus on Enlightenment studies, the relationship between philosophy and imaginative literature, and the history of ethics. His current book project, “The Enlightenment Crisis of Values,” is a transnational history of relativism. Eighteenth-century debates over relativism, the book argues, shed light on two disparate features of the Enlightenment’s legacy: the movement’s defense of universal human rights and its fraught involvement in the rise of modern racism and sexism.