Matthew Handelman

Biography

Ph.D., Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pensylvania

Matthew Handelman is an Associate Professor of German and a member of the Core Faculty in the Digital Humanities at MSU. His research interests include German-Jewish literature and philosophy in the early twentieth century, the intersections of science, mathematics and culture in German-speaking countries, as well as the digital humanities and the history of technology. His first book, The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origin and Promise of Critical Theory appeared with Fordham University Press in 2019. It explores the underdeveloped possibilities of mathematics for critical theory, focusing on how mathematics helped Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer navigate the intellectual crises facing German Jews during the Weimar Republic. Matthew has published on these topics, as well as others, in international journals such as The Germanic Review, Scientia Poetica and The Leo Baeck Yearbook.

He is currently working on a book about the cultural politics of critical theory. The idea of Kulturpolitik — the primacy of culture in political discourse and the ability of cultural critique to intervene in politics — runs throughout the critical project, from the culture wars of the Weimar Republic from which it emerged to its wartime and postwar theorizations of antisemitism to its own refraction in conspiracy theories in contemporary politics. Preliminary studies on this topic, especially its relationship to generative artificial intelligence, have appeared in Critical Inquiry: “Artificial Antisemitism: Critical Theory in the Age of Datafication.”

Much of Matthew’s research and teaching explores the relationship among critical theory, mathematical thinking, and the digital humanities. He brings these interests to various digital projects, including a co-led project called: “Below the Line: The Feuilleton and Modern Jewish Cultures,” and a co-authored work on “Digital Dialectics” with Leif Weatherby.