I have written about European intellectual culture from 1500 to the present, mostly in England, France, Italy and Germany.
The past has excited me for almost as long as I can remember. When I was a little child, it was archaeology and archaeological sites. When I was an older child, it was military and diplomatic history. But as a university student, I came to feel that how we understood the past, and how we tried to communicate that understanding to others, required a conceptual self-awareness that not all historical writing displayed. So, I added philosophy to my study of history. I was fascinated by the architecture of Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, and John Pocock’s notion of an ancient constitution. I weighed going to The Johns Hopkins University to do a Ph.D under his supervision, but decided instead to go to Cambridge and study with Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck and Istvan Hont.
I began with a deep interest in the history of political thought, but as I came to understand how political ideas were bound up with the broader ways our ancestors construed their worlds, my own interests broadened, too. It was Neo-Stoicism and Tacitism in Monteverdi’s Venice that brought me to Peter-Paul Rubens, who illustrated Justus Lipsius’s works—Rubens’s brother had been Lipsius’s top student before his early death—and whose letters to the Provençal polymath Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc then set me on a two-decades’ worth adventure.
Studying Peiresc meant reading over his shoulder since he wrote constantly, published nothing (except a short, anonymous pamphlet), and since the oblivion into which he soon fell preserved his archive more or less completely intact. My fascination with him was only exhausted after I had written four books—one about him in and of the intellectual culture of the early decades of the seventeenth century, a second about his work in the last pre-disciplinary generation of oriental studies, a third about his work on the medieval history of Provence and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the fourth, reprising that earlier interest in Braudel, on the early seventeenth-century Mediterranean. It was from thinking about the afterlife of Peiresc that I came to write a history of the study of material culture. It was from watching Peiresc do research and talk about research that I came to realize that research, like antiquarianism, was another subject that had been working tectonically, for hundreds of years. And, finally, and perhaps most weirdly, working on how Peiresc managed his research life gave me all sorts of ideas about how to organize research work when I was dean of a graduate research institute—ideas that I then put into practice.
Studying knowledge by starting from objects as evidence and working my way up to larger structures of knowledge — rather than from the history of disciplines and institutions down— led me to write about the “cultural sciences,” a body of thinking that had otherwise died with the suicide of German as the international language of scholarship in 1933. It also allowed me to think about academic administration not as the manufacture of rules, but as an intervention in the content of a research practice. One could write articles and books to change the way scholars worked—the usual slow, aspirational way—or, one could as administrator go ahead and implement the ideas directly, without writing those articles, and actually speed up that process of change. Administration as a form of publication. In this way of thinking, being a practicing administrator went from liability to advantage. My vision for what administrators could do was inspired by my archival work on past administrators and many “looking under the hood” conversations with current ones. I’m sure that as I continue this practice in a new institution I’ll also have new ideas about academic administration as a form of intellectual action.