My overarching area of historical specialization is nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy, particularly in North America, France, and Germany. I have studied debates about the meaning of history and the role of culture in American pragmatism (e.g., Charles S. Peirce, Jane Addams), the French spiritualist tradition (Félix Ravaisson, Émile Boutroux), the German tradition of Kulturphilosophie (Ernst Cassirer, Edgar Wind), and more broadly, the exchanges between philosophy and the emerging socio-cultural sciences. My book, Peirce on the Uses of History (De Gruyter, 2020) analyzes how Peirce understood history as a philosophical tool, linking it to both his philosophy of science and his own historical practice. In other publications, I have examined philosophical reflections on symbols, or the relationship between habit and culture.
Closely connected to the themes above, I am also interested in how cultural transmission has been conceptualized between nineteenth and twentieth century, often in ways that bridge cultural and natural sciences. I have written on cultural memory and the philosophy of habit, and I am currently working on a project (with Giovanna Targia, Zurich) on the historical semantics of the concept of "heritage" at the crossroads between biology and culture.
I'm interested in how our understandint of the social embeddedness of knowledge can be depened and enriched by attending to channels that are not commonly addressed by epistemologists. One of these channels is images and figurative practices, of which I examine their potential as cognitive tools. I have studied in particular how nineteenth-century thikers intertwined philosophical thought with visual practices, and how they theorized this connection. In this part of my research, I aim to foster dialogue between the history of philosophy, the history of the humanities and knowledge, as well as epistemology. I see integrated history and philosophy of science as a model that could inspire similar work in the humanities.
Part of my current research turns to another undervalued domain of knowledge-making: storytelling and vernacular narratives. In a recent article, I examined Jane Addam's understanding of urban legends in early twentieth-century Chicago. I am now extending this inquiry to other thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, with the aim of highlighting how folk narratives can articulate critical and cognitive perspectives.