Chad Wellmon

In his 1947 “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society,” Alan Turing writes… Read more: Turing, Training, and Intelligence

Jennifer Szalai just interviewed C Thi Nguyen about his new book The… Read more: C Thi Nguyen, Value Capture, and the University

The page proofs for After the University are here. Here’s the table… Read more: Page Proofs

This summer I wrote an essay about the idea of college and… Read more: Degrees of Anxiety

Download and read the “Introduction” to Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a… Read more: Introduction to Permanent Crisis

This week Paul Reitter and I spoke with Len Gutkin, an editor… Read more: The Groves of Academe are Always on Fire

On June 23rd, I delivered my first in-person lecture in over a… Read more: “Permanent Crisis” Lecture at St. John’s College

In the weeks following the U.S. presidential election in November, Twitter was… Read more: The Crushing Contradictions of the American University

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Jeff Bilbro of the Liberating… Read more: The Humanities’ Permanent Crisis: An Interview with Jeff Bilbro

Just out from Columbia University Press Information: Keywords, edited by Michele Kennerly,… Read more: Information: Keywords

This spring Andrew Piper and I are teaching a graduate seminar titled… Read more: Text, Data, and the Infrastructure of Knowledge

I’ve got a new essay out with Andrew Piper and Mohamed Cheriet… Read more: The Page Image

The catalogue copy and landing page for Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in… Read more: Permanent Crisis Out March 2021

On Sunday, June 10, 2012, Helen Dragas, rector of the University of… Read more: Information Overload & the Invention of the Modern Research University

In 1908, the first study of Germany’s ‘next generation of academics’ was… Read more: The Scholar’s Vocation

In the brief respite between total wars, most Christian intellectuals in Europe––from… Read more: Christian Humanism Is a Wooden Iron

Paul Reitter and I recently edited a new translation of Max Weber’s… Read more: Introduction to “Charisma & Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures”

In the summer of 1917, a group of university students in Munich… Read more: Weber and the Crisis of the Humanities

On January 28, 2020, NYRB Classics will publish Charisma and Disenchantment: The… Read more: (no title)

“Chad Wellmon has done a fair bit of dreaming and analyzing over… Read more: Intersecting Disciplines

We just submitted the manuscript for Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted… Read more: Permanent Crisis

Becoming Human

interacting with print

In “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, the eighteenth-century German… Read more: Detecting Footnotes in 32 Million Pages

Before he philosophized with a hammer, Friedrich Nietzsche counted Greek metre. In… Read more: THE YEAR OF WHOSE LORD?

In late December, Chris Martin interviewed me for “Half Hour of Heterodoxy,”… Read more: Interview with “Half Hour of Heterodoxy”

Paul Reitter and I are finishing up our new book Permanent Crisis: The… Read more: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age

On November 15, 2018, I delivered the 23rd Annual Holmes Lecture sponsored… Read more: The End(s) of the University

In 1904, while touring the eastern half of the United States, the… Read more: How Professors Ceded Their Authority

In 2007, the Higher Education Funding Council in England, the government body… Read more: Publication, Power, and Patronage

In 2017, the University of Virginia reported an operating budget of almost… Read more: Democracy & The University

Around nine in the evening on the night of August 11, 2017,… Read more: The Modest University

As an epithet for the university, “alma mater”—nourishing mother—has proved unfortunately apt.… Read more: Melancholy Mandarins

In 1637, René Descartes recounted a “fable” of how he came to… Read more: Let Us Think Together

Ten years ago, the Higher Education Funding Council for England decided to… Read more: Academic Prestige

In 1917 a group of German university students invited the renowned sociologist… Read more: After the University, Long Live the Academy!

Around 9 p.m. on Friday, I opened my kitchen door to chants… Read more: Don’t Look to Universities for Moral Clarity

The modern research university is under intense scrutiny. Some critics argue that… Read more: (no title)

Over the past two decades, long-running debates about the purposes and practices… Read more: Big Humanities and the Ethics of Knowledge

Americans don’t trust their institutions. According to a recent Gallup poll, only… Read more: The Limits of Expertise

[This is the text of a talk I delivered at “Virtue and… Read more: The University, Virtue and the Limits of Critique

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,… Read more: The Invention of Philosophy

Finance, football, and fraternities—not philosophy or physics—are the pillars of the modern… Read more: Whatever Happened to General Education?

Andrew Piper and I recently completed the first essay in a larger… Read more: Epistemic Inequality

From 2014-2016, I chaired an effort at the University of Virginia to… Read more: On What is Missing

The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook is out from the University… Read more: Rise of the Research University

In the winter of 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche, then a classics professor still… Read more: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age

Shortly before his death in in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled… Read more: Field of Dreams: On Public Universities

 This fall, the former ur-blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in New York… Read more: The Will is Not Enough

Today, to search is to google. Specifically, it is to use Google’s… Read more: The Future of Search

For critics on the political left and right, the contemporary and increasingly… Read more: Knowledge Machines: University to Search Engine

I am happy to announce that a new collaboration with Andrew Piper’s .txtLab and Mohamed Cheriet’s… Read more: The Visibility of Knowledge

Since at least the nineteenth century, research universities from Berlin to Baltimore… Read more: Revolution U: What today’s critics of the university get right…and wrong.

Of the power of art, history, and philosophy to change us there… Read more: Bibliotherapy

To search is to google––to use Google’s search engine to find something… Read more: Googling Before Google: A Brief History of Search

One of America’s unsung rites of spring is National Humanities Advocacy Day.… Read more: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in an Age of Disenchantment

On Sunday, June 10, 2012, Helen Dragas, rector of the University of… Read more: (no title)

The modern research university is a global institution with a rich history… Read more: (no title)

The faculty of the University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences… Read more: UVA Curriculum Reform

 Before there was big science or big data, there was big humanities. Until… Read more: The Big Humanities

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Assoc. Prof. Chad Wellmon a New… Read more: “Future Philology”: New Directions Fellowship

Ireland prides itself on the relatively high proportion of its young people… Read more: Irish Times Interview on Anti-Education

The main figures that populate our historical accounts of the Enlightenment are… Read more: The Enlightenment Index

The main figures that populate accounts of the Enlightenment are human–be they… Read more: Enlightenment, Some Assembly required

When people talk about inequality these days, they typically mean economic inequality,… Read more: Academic Inequality

With the 50th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities approaching, one… Read more: Quit Lit: An Interview on Anti-Education

When Max Weber suggested in 1917 that the world had been disenchanted,… Read more: Sacred Reading: From Augustine to the Digital Humanists

During the summer of 2014, two Cornell University scholars and a researcher… Read more: Uneasy in Digital Zion

In 1869, at the age of twenty-five, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche… Read more: (no title)