Clifford Siskin

Biography

Clifford Siskin is the Henry W. and Alfred A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University and the Director of The Re:Enlightenment Project His subject is the history of knowledge, with a current focus on the interrelations of forms of knowledge and forms of computation. Links between past and present inform all of his work, from his sequencing of the genres of subjectivity (The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, OUP) to his revealing the footings for the modern disciplines (The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830, Hopkins). With William Warner in This Is Enlightenment (Chicago), he devised the "history of mediation" as a conceptual tool for answering the question Kant made famous. His most recent book reveals how "system" became the central genre of Enlightenment and thus our primary form of knowing and a thing we love to blame (SYSTEM: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge, MIT). Professor Siskin is also co-editor, with Anne Mellor, of the Palgrave-Macmillan monograph series in "Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print." He has been the George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the A. C. Bradley Chair at the University of Glasgow, the Waynflete Lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford, Visiting Leverhulme Professor at Cambridge University, and Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.