This summer I wrote an essay about the idea of college and my experiences leading different projects here at the University of Virginia. “Degrees of Anxiety” was part of symposium on “college” in The Point Magazine. Read it online or as a PDF.

Download and read the “Introduction” to Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age:

This week Paul Reitter and I spoke with Len Gutkin, an editor at the Chronicle Review of Higher Education, and Merve Emre, a professor of literature at Oxford, about Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. The interview was published August 17 on the Chronicle‘s website (paywalled) and can be downloaded in full as […]

On June 23rd, I delivered my first in-person lecture in over a year. My hosts and the setting were ideal for talking with people and not Zoom. I introduced my new book (written with Paul Reitter) Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, which will be out in early August. Watch the entire talk […]

In the weeks following the U.S. presidential election in November, Twitter was aflutter with the suggestion that a Biden-Harris administration could issue an executive order canceling student-loan debt. The responses ranged from the moralizing — “Why should I pay for other peoples’ poor choices?” — to the hortatory — “Higher ed is a right!” — […]

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Jeff Bilbro of the Liberating Arts about “The Humanities’ Permanent Crisis.” In a wide-ranging interview, we discussed Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, the history and future of the humanities, liberal learning, and intellectual life after the university. You can watch on YouTube: Or you can download […]

Just out from Columbia University Press Information: Keywords, edited by Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan Abel. With chapters on algorithm, archive, cognition, index, keyword, and more, this volume has some brilliant scholars, including Katherine Hayles, Dan Rosenberg, Bernard Dionysius Geoghagen, Wolf Kittler, and several more. I wrote the chapter on “Knowledge”: In the “Unreasonable […]

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 […]