About Us
Greg Laugero
My intellectual interests take their departure from Infrastructures of Enlightenment, a study of how eighteenth-century Britain’s turnpikes, printing presses, libraries, and postal routes reshaped the county and therefore the world. Since then, I have followed the afterlives of infrastructure through a 30-year career in software, a meta-industry that now underwrites every other. Across these domains I trace how systems of communication, commerce, and culture generate new forms of belonging and experiences of time.
My current projects, Time Out of Joint and Time as Practice, continue these pursuits.
Helmut Müller-Sievers
My work is concerned with the intersections of literature, science, and philosophy in the 18th and 19th century. I investigate the manifest relations between these discourses -- for example in the work of Goethe, Kleist, Büchner, or Hölderlin -- as well as the structural and cultural impact these discourses have on one another. I am particularly interested in the relation between the approaches taken by early 19th century engineers and the formal innovations of what became realist narrative. My most recent publications concern the relationship of literary studies and experience as conceived in Mahayana Buddhism and in Western Metaphyics.