School of Humanities and Sciences

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  Bryan Nelson Norton

  Lecturer
  

  Current Research and Scholarly InterestsNorton's first book, Planetary Idealism: The Technics of Nature in German Romanticism, is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. Planetary Idealism investigates how a set of poets and philosophers begin addressing the shifting relations between humans, technical media, and nature in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and start of the nineteenth. During this time, writers such as Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Hegel turn to natural history, poetic experimentation, and Kant’s interrogation of a “technic of nature” in an effort to develop alternatives mode of inhabiting the planet at the outset of the Anthropocene.
  
  His second project, Salt, explores the vital role of an everyday mineral in the making of modernity. The book uncovers the diverse and surprising ways in which salt has come to form contemporary ideas about nature, culture, and even politics around the globe. Currently under review, the book explores the mineral’s centrality to a number of formats and contexts, from lithium extraction and salt tourism in Bolivia to the rise to fame of celebrity chef Nusret Gökçem, aka “Salt Bae.” Drawing particular attention to the mineral basis of digital media and infrastructure, Salt raises vital questions about how modern life has been composed, consumed, and is even dissolved.
  
  Norton is also co-editing a volume of essays on the late philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler.