Edmund J. Campion earned his Ph.D. in French at Yale University in 1976. He taught French at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from January 1977 until December 2009. His major contribution to philosophy was his 1995 book Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot as Readers of Erasmus. He also published extensively on Erasmus, French writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Senegalese poet Leopold Sedar Senghor,