Fellows » Current Fellows » IHUM Fellow: Jeff Schwegman, PhD
Jeffrey Schwegman studied history and music as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and he is delighted to be back at the Farm teaching for the IHUM program. He received his PhD in history from Princeton University in 2008, where he concentrated on early modern and modern European cultural and intellectual history and the history of science. He subsequently held a two-year research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and has also spent considerable time in France, including as an exchange student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Jeffrey’s research focuses on the cultural history of the French Enlightenment, and he is particularly interested in the history of reading, pedagogy, learned identities, and the development of the early human sciences. His current book project, Metaphysics for an Enlightened Age: Condillac and the Practice of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, explores transformations in the pedagogical identity of the philosopher in eighteenth-century France, a period during which many savants left the universities to cultivate new roles as public men of letters. Instead of teaching a small, relatively homogeneous body of students in person, they now sought to teach the broad, heterogeneous reading public through the impersonal medium of the printed word. This project explores how these philosophes adopted and transformed earlier teaching techniques for this new audience and medium and the impact these strategies had on period theories of knowledge. It focuses in particular on the career of the influential Parisian metaphysician Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, whose life and work typified many of these trends.