I am a social theorist, historian & philosopher of the human sciences, and assistant professor at Duke University, where I teach in the Program in Literature, Duke’s interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies program. I am also the co-director of Duke’s Institute for Critical Theory, where I convene the Critical Theory Workshop.

My first book, Madness and Enterprise (University of Chicago Press), explores how turn-of-the century psychiatrists across Europe and North America deployed an economic style of reasoning to resolve ambiguities with respect to status of mental health. In so doing, they inadvertently altered a longstanding equivalence between mental health and economic prosperity, by suggesting that in many cases mental pathologies were compatible with remunerative economic conduct and that sometimes a degree of madness was actually essential for financial success. The very category of madness, I argue, was transformed into an economic form, and consequently evaluated on the basis of its economic prospects, rather than simply on its medical or moral merits.

I am currently writing my second book, tentatively titled The Veridical Bind: Truth and Its Others, which explores the specter of ‘anti-science’ in the American political imaginary and, concomitantly, how the humanistic categories of ‘critique’ and ‘critical theory’ have been increasingly perceived as complicit with, and as providing intellectual succor for, scientific skepticism and, as such, culpable not only with the erosion of scientific truth but with core tenets of liberal democracy itself. My publications thus far have covered an array of topics in the history and philosophy of the human sciences, critical and social theory, intellectual history, and historical epistemology.

Before arriving at Duke, I was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Duke, and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, where I was affiliated faculty in History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. I received my PhD in the Rhetoric program at the University of California, Berkeley.