Over the past several years, my research and teaching interests have moved between, on the one hand, anthropological engagement with intellectuals, expertise, professionalism, and knowledge, and, on the other, the study of media, journalism, public culture, and social identity-formation. These various interests eventually intersected in the manuscript for my first book, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Spirit and System is an effort to understand the sociological and phenomenological dimensions of dialectical knowledge in modern German intellectual culture ranging from everyday intersubjective acts and encounters to the formal and technical languages of philosophy and theory.

My current field research project focuses on the political-economic, social, and phenomenological dimensions of news journalism. News journalism has transformed rather radically over the past two decades as global informational economies, digital technology and corporate consolidation have reshaped and rescaled news journalism as a professional practice. Indeed, many news journalists are actively trying to understand how their ability to "make" news has changed. I am pursuing field research within news organizations in Germany (and, increasingly, in the United States as well) guided by this question of what kinds of agency and what modes of attention journalists possess within contemporary fast-time production and dissemination of news. At the moment, I am working on the problem of how different scales and rhythms of mediation affect journalistic attentions and intentions as well as how journalists' social knowledge of the constitutional relationship between "news" and "publics" guides their professional practice.

Meanwhile, I have completed a short book, Understanding Media: A popular philosophy, for Prickly Paradigm Press which will appear in Fall, 2007. Understanding Media is designed to provoke reflection on our common habits of thought concerning media and mediation and to suggest ways in which these common habits can be expanded and improved. And, I am working now on another short book project, provisionally titled, The Future of Social Theory, which seeks to rethink the contemporary practice of social theory beyond discourses of crisis and redemption and in terms of what I call a 'multiattentional approach' to theoretical practice.

Link to CV.