It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book that has understanding for me, . . . surely I do not need to trouble myself. —Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?’” The main figures that populate our historical accounts of the Enlightenment are human—be they enemies of Enlightenment, such […]

In January of 1869, Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a peach of a job—a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel. Nietzsche was just twenty-four and far from completing his dissertation, but the university’s standards for employment were looser than those of its German counterparts. Nietzsche was delighted, so much so that upon learning […]

Published in First Things, 4.16.15 “In his Organizing Enlightenment, Chad Wellmon explains how the modern research university was a response to a crisis of “information overload.” The Enlightenment saw an explosion of new knowledge and research. The Enlightenment empire of erudition was a bookish empire. Philosophes imagined they could provide a unified account of knowledge by “capturing it in print” […]

On May 8, 2015, Scott Jaschik interviewed me for Inside Higher Ed.

 Huge Digital Project Maps Explosion of Print During the Enlightenment April 3, 2015 Jane Kelly If the World Wide Web existed in the 18th century, how would the seminal work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant fare? Would there be lots of links to his work? Just a few? These are the types of questions researchers at […]

  To judge from the jeremiads of some of academe’s elite scolds, the specialized scholar is an anachronism. Disciplinarity is dead. Or it should be.

Twilight of an Idol Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, by William Deresiewicz William Deresiewicz, a former professor of English at Yale University, is not a fan of American elite education. He says that it “manu- factures young people who are smart and talented and driven, […]

Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today, however, its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by radical technological change.  Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about […]

Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities James Turner Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction Jerome McGann Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. In the not-too-distant past, whenever January came around, the New York Times could be counted on to publish a […]