At Risk U Speaker Series: Theory in the University

Chad Wellmon is the the Commonwealth Professor of English and German at the University of Virginia, where he also holds an appointment in History. There he teaches and writes about European intellectual history, the history of knowledge and technology, universities, and social theory. Wellmon has written or edited books on the history of anthropology, the modern research university, the history of reading and print, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Weber, with essays published in The Times Literary Supplement, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Hedgehog Review. His last book (co-authored with Paul Reitter) Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (Chicago, 2022) explored the prevalence of crisis language as foundational to the humanities as conceived and enacted throughout modern history. In his new book After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work (Johns Hopkins, 2026) Wellmon relates a history of the university from the perspective of intellectual desire.