Wolfram Schmidgen

Wolfram Schmidgen is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and culture, intellectual history, and religion-literature intersections. His research reconstructs cultural histories challenging modernization narratives through dialogic engagement with past traditions.

Education includes:

• PhD from University of Chicago
• MA from Free University Berlin
• MA from Binghamton University

Research explores voluntarist theology's influence on literary invention and cultural mixture paradigms. Current project examines object-oriented scholarship in humanities through ethical frameworks. Teaching covers courses like 'The Secret Life of Things' and 'Inventing the Novel'.

Graduate supervision emphasizes supporting first-generation college students. Recent books include Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds (2021) analyzing religious foundations of literary experiments, and Exquisite Mixture (2012) tracing cultural hybridity arguments.