Matthew Handelman

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

Matt is an Associate Professor of German, a member of the Core Faculty in the Digital Humanities, and Affiliated Faculty in Jewish Studies at MSU. His research interests include German-Jewish literature and philosophy in the early twentieth century and the intersections of critical theory and digital technologies and cultures.

His essay, “Digital Dialectics,” co-authored with Leif Weatherby, is set to appear in a multi-authored volume, Digital Theory, with M. Beatrice Fazi and Alexander R. Galloway. 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 his research and teaching explores the relationship among critical theory, mathematical thinking, and the digital humanities.

Matt is currently a Frankel Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he is working on a book about German Jewish intellectuals in the age of mass media. The idea of Kulturpolitik — the primacy of culture in political discourse and the ability of cultural critique to intervene in politics — runs throughout the work of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno, from the culture wars of the Weimar Republic to its wartime and postwar theorizations of antisemitism to its own refraction in conspiracy theories in contemporary politics. He brings these interests to various digital projects, including a co-led project called: “Below the Line: The Feuilleton and Modern Jewish Cultures.”

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.