research overview
- My research explores the literary, theatrical, artistic, philosophical, scientific, and theological culture of Western Europe as a whole from the Renaissance to the end of the 18th-century Enlightenment. A growing focus is what early moderns called 'the experimental,' a word that covers both the kind of natural scientific activity for which modern English coined the term 'experiment' and the properties of experience in general, whether methodized or spontaneous. A second, more theoretical emphasis of my work is extending the early modern sense of 'the experimental' to a general reassessment of the nature of humanistic scholarship and of the processes of imaginative creation behind the objects (texts, images, monuments, traditions) humanists study.
