Due to the weather, this lecture has been postponed. We hope to announce a new date soon.

Emily J. Levine will be presenting at the Seminar in Cultural History on Wednesday, March 15 at 6 pm. Her talk is entitled “An Intellectual History of Financing Scholarship.”

Emily J. Levine is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize by the American Historical Association in 2015 for the best book in European history from 1815 through the twentieth century. The book was also a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Cultural and Media Studies awarded by the Association for Jewish Studies. Levine spent 2012–2013 as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Free University in Berlin. She received her PhD and MA from Stanford University and her BA from Yale University, where she was also a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. She is now at work on a transatlantic history of the research university tentatively titled Exceptional Institutions: Cities, Capital, and the Rise of the Research University.

Newly aware of the economic value of research, early twentieth-century philanthropists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic poured an unprecedented amount of money into academic organizations. However, in the emerging competition between Germany and America for global research hegemony, leaders made divergent choices about where that research should occur, and how it should be governed. With the founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (later Max Plank Institutes) in 1910, Germany moved much research outside the university, whereas the contemporaneous founding of the Carnegie institutions in the US supported research within it. Using a transatlantic lens, this talk examines the impact of these parallel and perpendicular choices on the organization of scholarship at the turn of the last century and the resonance of those choices today. It demonstrates that the material conditions of scholarship are central to understanding the contexts in which ideas emerge.