Andrew Cole

Andrew Cole is a Guggenheim Fellow, 2014-15. He is the author of The Birth of Theory (Chicago, 2014), which details Hegel’s discovery of the dialectic in medieval philosophy and invites theorists to sharpen their dialectics on a broader intellectual history ranging from Plotinus to Deleuze. A small portion of this work will appear in Slovenian in Problemi. The Birth of Theory is the first volume of a three-part study. Elements of the Ideal, the second installment, examines the dialectic of idealism and materialism over many centuries from Plato to the medieval mathematicians, and includes expositions of Proust, Lenin, Adorno, Lacan, and of course Hegel. Recently, Andrew has edited a special topic of the minnesota review, entitled “The Medieval Turn in Theory” (spring 2013), which includes his paper “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object Oriented Ontologies.” He has also edited with his colleague, D. Vance Smith, The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, with an Afterword by Fredric Jameson (Duke, 2010). Andrew has also written a major study of late medieval literature entitled, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge, 2008), and recently has published The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (co-ed. Andrew Galloway, 2014), which caps off his ten years as a co-editor at the Yearbook of Langland Studies (vols. 18-25). His many articles on medieval literature appear in such journals as ELH and Speculum. Previously, Andrew has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford and a Bloomfield Fellow at Harvard University. At Princeton at large, he sits with the executive committees for the Medieval Studies Program and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities.