Peiresc was a polymath who studied everything. Many modern disciplines, such as, history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, history of religion, have their origin in early modern antiquarian scholarship. The late nineteenth-century argument, in German, that all of these decay products of antiquarianism constituted a set of “cultural sciences”—and with this we are not far from Marx’s “science of history” — lay at the heart of some of the most interesting twentieth-century scholarship . The development of the museum as a research institution over the course of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century was bound up with this new way of sorting disciplines. That historical phenomenon suggested to me that “pre-disciplinary interdisciplinarity” could have something to teach us about today’s “post-disciplinary interdisciplinary,” or “poly-disciplinarity,” feeding my work as the administrator of a graduate institute with a gallery that displayed and published research.

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“Description Terminable and Interminable: Looking at the Past, Nature and Peoples in Peiresc’s Archive,” “Historia”: Empricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, eds. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005), 355-97\

“Marx and Material Culture: Istvan Hont and the History of Scholarship,” Markets, Morals, Politics. Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought, eds. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus A. Reinert, Richard Whatmore. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 23-52

Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences. University of Toronto Press, 2007

The Museum in the Cultural Sciences: Collecting, Displaying, and Interpreting Material Culture. Cultural Histories of the Material World 8. Bard Graduate Center, 2021

“Kulturwissenschaft Before Warburg,” in Aby Warburg 150. Work, Legacy, Promise, eds. David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2023), 47-57