Dissertation

My dissertation project ("Irreversible: Kleist, Kafka, and the Present's Past") is part of a broader investigation of the history--material, philosophical, experiential--of time. Drawing on the work of Reinhart Koselleck and Niklas Luhmann, I argue for the emergence in the late 18th century of a new mode of temporal experience, one in which the past is a product of the present--and not vice-versa. This is both product and impetus of new media technologies; I trace the reflection and theorization of this novel temporality in and through the works of authors whom I take to be its privileged thinkers: Kleist, Nietzsche, Kafka, excavating and reconstructing the media-historical substrate of their thought.

A recent summary of the project (in the form of a funding proposal for a general academic audience) is available below.