This spring Andrew Piper and I are teaching a graduate seminar titled “Text, Data, and the Infrastructure of knowledge. Here’s the description: In this seminar, we will consider a broad range of questions concerning the preservation, circulation, reproduction, and interpretation of texts in a digital realm from what we call the historical concerns of philology. […]

I’ve got a new essay out with Andrew Piper and Mohamed Cheriet titled “The Page Image: Towards a Visual History of Digital Documents.” It was published in the most recent volume of Book History. Here’s a paragraph from the introduction about what we’re trying to do: Our more immediate aim in this essay is to […]

On Sunday, June 10, 2012, Helen Dragas, rector of the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors, announced that President Teresa Sullivan and the board had “mutually agreed” that Sullivan would resign. Citing a “rapidly changing” higher education environment, Dragas insisted that the university had to change, and fast. In the ensuing weeks, Dragas alluded to […]

In 1908, the first study of Germany’s ‘next generation of academics’ was published, written by the German economist Franz Eulenburg. After 200 pages of line graphs and tables, he concluded that they were neither young nor going anywhere. Although some who taught in Germany’s world-renowned universities enjoyed the freedom presumed to accompany an academic life, […]

In the brief respite between total wars, most Christian intellectuals in Europe––from Catholics such as Jacques Maritain and Simon Weil to Protestants such as W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis––professed an allegiance to humanism, as did an array of confessing and non-confessing Communists, Dada-ists, Futurists, liberals, and Marxists. But beyond a general commitment to the human, they tended to agree […]

Paul Reitter and I recently edited a new translation of Max Weber’s two vocation lectures by Damion Searls. NYRB Classics published them this past February. As part of this volume, Paul and I also wrote an introduction: In the summer of 1917, a group of university students in Munich invited Max Weber to launch a […]

In the summer of 1917, a group of university students in Munich invited Max Weber to launch a lecture series on “intellectual work as a vocation” with a talk about the scholar’s work. He was, in a way, an odd choice. Fifty-three at the time, Weber hadn’t held an academic job in over a decade. […]

On January 28, 2020, NYRB Classics will publish Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by Max Weber, edited by and with an introduction from Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, translated from the German by Damion Searls. In 1919, just months before he died unexpectedly of pneumonia, the sociologist Max Weber published two lectures that he had […]