Skip to Content

The Charles Bernheimer Prize Citations 2013 HM

2013 Prize Honorable Mention Winner:

This year's Bernheimer Prize Honorable Mention Award for Best Dissertation by a Graduate Student in Comparative Literature goes to David Simon of the University of California, Berkeley, for his dissertation, "Careless Engagements: Literature, Science, and the Ethics of Indifference in Early Modernity."

Modern science is often understood as an end-driven process, and recent historiography has privileged the emergence of objectivity over other sensory and cognitive dimensions of knowledge production. David Simon's dissertation, "Careless Engagements: Literature, Science, and the Ethics of Indifference in Early Modernity," rethinks the importance of receptivity and disposition to the new epistemologies of the seventeenth century. Exploring the connection between literature and natural philosophy, Simon theorizes a state of "nonchalance" or "carelessness" that encourages the capacity for insight. He shows that figures as different as Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton shared an interest in the cognitive advantages of casual indifference, casting a new light on the motifs of instrumental reason and teleological progress that organize the intellectual history of the period.

2013 Bernheimer Prize Committee:
Sangeeta Ray, University of Maryland (Chair)
Peter Paik, University of Wisconsin
Monica Popescu, McGill University