As a political economist, I find in the humanities the intellectual and moral tools necessary to study social change in a world increasingly in thrall to market forces.
I study how facts become authoritative in public life. For me, the task of the humanities is comprehension, or as Arendt put it: facing up to–and, where necessary, resisting–reality.
I am concerned with visions of utopian societies and their value for effecting desirable social change. Desire and hope for a better future lie at the core of my work in Humanities and Social Change.
Philosophy of literature aims not only at interpreting the world, particularly the way fiction forms our moral and political beliefs, but also, doing so, at changing it.
Dramatic social change presents an interpretive challenge: a gap between changes occurring in society, and our ability to assess the significance of those changes. We want to interrogate that gap.
As poetic making informs how individuals come to know and value each other in the early modern period, so for me it opens up questions of freedom and equality in our own.
