Curriculum vitae

I specialize in German history, modern European history, global history, historical sociology, and the history of knowledge.

The common thread in all my work is a focus on "practical intellectuals" — thinkers who also do. Typically this leads me to study thinkers and clusters of thinkers who found or reform institutions, whether bureaucracies, parliaments, corporations, or schools, but especially universities and other institutions of higher learning. I am as interested in the unglamorous middle tier of improvisers, administrators, and other everyday practitioners as I am in the grand designers, visionaries, and strategists.

My first two books examined practical intellectuals from within the framework of German history, and reflect my abiding interest in liberalism, democracy, and civic life. One of them, "Medicine on a Grand Scale": Rudolf Virchow, Liberalism, and the Public Health, was a short study of one of the nineteenth century's most influential physicians and political reformers; in 2019, it appeared in Korean translation. The other, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s-1820s, analyzed the machinations of powerful local scribes (Schreiber) who participated in the profound civic and political transformation of southwestern Germany after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasions.

With Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet, coauthored with my wife and colleague Lisa Wolverton, I turned squarely to the comparative, long-term study of intellectuals and knowledge systems. The book chronicles the six institutions that have fueled the quest for knowledge in the Western tradition from ancient times to the present day: the library, the monastery, the university, the Republic of Letters, the disciplines, and the laboratory. Each, we argue, has superseded its predecessors in fashioning entirely new rationales and practices for pursuing knowledge in response to society’s needs. Reinventing Knowledge has been translated into Arabic, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.

In other work, I have written about the Renaissance academies, the kindergarten's roots in German philosophy, the Austrian-American management guru Peter Drucker, the global study of languages around 1800, the neoliberal reform of universites in Thatcher's Britain, and the origins of "student development theory" in Sixties counterculture.

My forthcoming book, The University Unfettered: Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption, conducts a retrospective stress test on the public flagship university between the Great Recession and COVID-19. It builds in part on my experiences as a 2016-17 American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow, during which I shadowed academic leaders across the country. The book will be published by Columbia University Press in 2025.

I have also served in several administrative roles, including as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences (2012-17), Department Head of German and Scandinavian (2018-21), and Founding Executive Director of the School of Global Studies and Languages (2021-22).

Courses I've taught include:

• The Early Modern World, 1450-1850
• Modern Europe (The 18th Century)
• Cultural History of the Enlightenment
• Freemasonry and Secret Societies
• Science in Nineteenth-Century Europe
• Reacting to the Past
• The Quality of Life in Germany and Scandinavia
• What is Socialism Anyway? A European View
• How Universities Work
• Berlin and the Urban Experience (study abroad)
• Europe Today