Public Research Talk: How Divinity Scholars Found the Human in the Humanities

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In “We Philologists” (1875), Nietzsche charges his profession with asking the wrong question. Research should be guided not by “what are we to science?” but by “what is science to us ?” Emerson, his lifelong educator, had explored this question decades earlier. In “Literary Ethics” (1838), he credits German scholars with recognizing that “Greek history is one thing to me; another to you”—an insight that drew Transcendentalists and other figures associated with Harvard and the Unitarian church toward German research. This lecture traces how professionalized methods of inquiry and public literary criticism shaped each other across the Atlantic. It shows how reading, translation, conversation, and pedagogy connected scholarship to religious and social life, generating public forms of poetic critique with urgent stakes in liberal education, religion, and women’s intellectual authority.

Ulrike Wagner is Director of the German Studies Program at Bard College Berlin. Her research and teaching explore the global history of the humanities, philological practices, German Romanticism and American Transcendentalism, German-Jewish women writers, and feminist theory. She recently completed Transcendental Philology: Emerson, Fuller, Nietzsche, and the Migrations of a Method . During her residency at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions, she examines how women critics—including Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bettina von Arnim, Rahel Varnhagen, and their circles—used publication and public conversation to redefine the relation between scholarship and public criticism, making social reform central to the practice of literary criticism.