Bryan Nelson Norton

Bio

Bryan Norton is a scholar of media and the environment, specializing in German literature, philosophy, and visual culture from the eighteenth century to the present. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022, during which time he was elected a member of the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford. His research and teaching investigates how novel aesthetic forms and media formats are used by writers, filmmakers, and others to address the Gordian knot of environmental crisis, postcolonial upheaval, and technological change. His first book, Planetary Idealism: The Technics of Nature in German Idealism, is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. He publishes widely on topics ranging from early film and literature, Kant and German Idealism, the history of technology, and contemporary art. Other recent writings can be found in SubStance, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Politics, Modern Language Notes, and the Journal of Visual Culture.

Academic Appointments

• Lecturer, German Studies

Professional Education

• PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (2022)

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

Norton'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.

Projects

• Planetary Idealism: The Technics of Nature in German Idealism

  Norton'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.

  Location

  Stanford

• Negentropy and the Future of Exteriorization, Stanford/Duke

  for Bernard Stiegler

  Location

  Paris