This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the …
“‘Poor Sinners’ Pamphlets’” is a history of the evolving relationship among body, text, and technology from the perspective of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European criminology documents. Developed in my joint graduate and undergraduate seminar in the digital humanities (AL 340 / AL 891, Spring 2016), this site offers scholars a collection of …
The online collection, “Critical Comics: A Critical Approach to Digitizing Comics at MSU,” brings together archival materials from MSU’s Special Collection Comic Art Collection and digital humanities techniques to investigate the evolving relationship between text and technology – in print and on the screen. A product of my AL/DH 340 …
“The Annotated Star” is a collaborative international project initiated by researchers seeking to use the digital humanities to preserve and help generate scholarship on the work of the German-Jewish philosopher, translator, and theologian, Franz Rosenzweig. The project engages a number of aspects of Rosenzweig’s oeuvre with the methods of the …
This article consists of a theoretical framework for and a demonstration of the process of visualizing the finding aid to Franz Rosenzweig’s archive at the University of Kassel, which contains metadata describing documents and letters pertaining to the German-Jewish philosopher, pedagogue, and translator. Its main contention is …
This article investigates a forgotten essay contest proposed by Gershom Scholem to Werner Kraft in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s seminal text “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” (1916). Intent on completing Benjamin’s language essay …
Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960) represents a monumental achievement in the history of film theory and a milestone in Kracauer’s own career. At the work’s core, Kracauer proposes that film can “redeem” reality by revealing otherwise unknown aspects of the material world. As this paper argues, the notion of “redemption” invoked by the work draws …
Ludwig Büchner’s popular-scientific treatise “Die Macht der Vererbung” and Theodor Storm’s novella “Der Herr Etatsrath” serendipitously appeared in consecutive issues of Westermann’s illustrierte deutsche Monatshefte between June and August 1881. For Büchner, the numerous talents
There are many sides to Siegfried Kracauer – the film theorist, sociologist, and friend to and mentor of many members of the Frankfurt School. One of these sides that has remained largely untheorized is Kracauer’s relationship to…