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"Wellmon, Chad"
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Organizing Enlightenment
The Enlightenment-era concerns that gave rise to the modern research university can illuminate contemporary debates about knowledge in the digital age. Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by radical technological change. Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about revolutionary technologies and their disruptive effects on established institutions of knowledge. Drawing on the histories of science, the university, and print, as well as media theory and philosophy, Chad Wellmon explains how the research university and the ethic of disciplinarity it created emerged as the final and most lasting technology of the Enlightenment. Organizing Enlightenment reveals higher education's story as one not only of the production of knowledge but also of the formation of a particular type of person: the disciplinary self. In order to survive, the university would have to institutionalize a new order of knowledge, one that was self-organizing, internally coherent, and embodied in the very character of the modern, critical scholar.
eBook
LOYAL WORKERS AND DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS: BIG HUMANITIES AND THE ETHICS OF KNOWLEDGE
Over the past two decades, long-running debates about the purposes and practices of humanistic inquiry have been refocused as a debate about the uncertain fate of the humanities in a digital age. Now, with the advent of digital and computational humanities, scholars are discussing with a new urgency what the humanities are for and what it means to practice them. And many suggest that the surfeit of digital data is unprecedented and are calling for new methods, practices, and epistemologies. This article considers these claims in light of a longer history of what Lorraine Daston has called “practices of compendia”––practices of collecting, collating, and interpreting massive amounts of data. It focuses, in particular, on the late nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen and the range of projects he initiated and led as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Mommsen invented the “big humanities” and what his contemporaries termed the “industrial” model of scholarship, a model that helped create a new, modern scholarly persona and a distinctly modern ethics of knowledge.
Journal Article
The Enlightenment Index
In this essay, we survey Enlightenment authors’ relationship to print, and explain how footnotes, foldout sheets, catalogues, and review magazines gave shape to a network of citation that we call “the Enlightenment Index.” The print technologies examined here, along with their human counterparts (i.e. the authors and publishers), will be characterized as agents co-constitutive of a Great Chain of Reference that was supposed to manage bibliographic excess by bibliographic means. As a heuristic, the Index functions in two ways: it refers to the proliferating empirical traces on particular pages as well as to the ideal of a completely assembled network of all such pages and cross-references. In the context of eighteenth-century philosophy, the two aspects of the Index align with empiricist and rationalist accounts of knowledge. Our argument may also be understood in terms of periodization: while a tension between real and ideal obtains, we operate in an Enlightenment media environment. Because the Enlightenment pursues a complete account of all that has been printed, its Index is both a material reality and a functional means, (albeit an incomplete one), for navigating that reality. It was Romanticism that repudiated the Index as an ideal and promoted competing practices of indexicality to control and transcend the excesses of print.
Journal Article
Touching Books: Diderot, Novalis,and the Encyclopedia of the Future
This article considers the reinvention of the Enlightenment encyclopedic tradition in a late eighteenth-century Germany overwhelmed by the proliferation of print. In particular, it traces a shift in the very metaphors of encyclopedic knowledge from those of vision that characterized Diderot and D'Alembert'sEncyclopédieto those of touch that characterized the German poet Novalis'sAllgemeine Brouillon.
Journal Article
How the Philologist Became a Physician of Modernity
This article makes the case that the lecture series On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, which Friedrich Nietzsche held in 1872 and scholars have long neglected, marks a crucial point in the development of the philosopher's outlook. In doing so, the article shows that Nietzsche's lectures resonate in suggestive ways with twenty-first-century debates about higher education.
Journal Article
Languages, Cultural Studies, and the Futures of Foreign Language Education
Wellmon comments to those institutions and those faculty who train and produce the faculty of the future--research institutions. Such a focus seems justified because the report itself displays a bias toward them; but beyond that, it may indeed be necessary. If the institutions of training and production do not transform themselves, change across the field will be piecemeal and ineffective. The report's call to recognition must be heard as well by those who set the FL agenda within the academy both structurally and pragmatically--that is, by those on tenure committees, journal editorial boards, and outside reviews. A complicating factor is that the report's additional call for translingual and transcultural competence may be misapprehended, precisely because it is a call for disciplinary, not just departmental rethinking and reorganization.
Journal Article
Engaging Students in Advising and General Education Requirements
The focus of this essay is to examine how general education requirements and advising are connected in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. To do this, we begin with a brief description and history of general education requirements. We move next to a description of the advising system and general education requirements of the College of Arts and Sciences and the current requirements and advising system and conclude with an overview of where the College is headed within the next three to five years.
Journal Article