My research is broadly concerned with the political responsibility of the human sciences. I'm especially interested in the conflict between traditional cultural values and the rise of modern scientific consciousness in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German, French, and Anglophone contexts.

In my dissertation, "The Politics of Exact Imagination," I examine a group of writers who sought to establish a new methodological foundation for the human sciences at the end of the First World War: Ernst Troeltsch, Erich von Kahler, Oswald Spengler, and Walter Benjamin. In their efforts to respond to the pathology of historical disorientation, the positivistic cult of “exact science,” and the thirst for spiritual counsel among students in the early Weimar Republic, these protagonists turned to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s conception of “exact imagination,” a faculty oriented toward the cognition of organic wholes, which they applied in experimental works of historiography and cultural criticism that blur the boundaries between social science and imaginative literature. By reevaluating the political implications of these interdisciplinary experiments and rehabilitating their methodological core, my project offers an alternative to the ethos of disenchantment that dominates humanistic research today while also presenting a set of meditations on the role of the scholarship in dark times. 

Beyond this, I'm perennially interested in the history of methodological disputes in the study of culture and society, particularly controversies that draw attention to the heterogeneity of German, French, and Anglo-American philosophical and scientific traditions. My writings on the competing legacies of "critical theory" in the postwar European and American academic landscape have appeared in Radical PhilosophyHistorical Materialism, and Telos.

Educational Background
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Educational Background

  • B.A.: Music, Bard College, 2013
  • M.A.: Critical Theory and the Arts, School of Visual Arts, 2015