Dissertation Title:
Attention and Society: The Politics of Consciousness in Central Europe, 1720-1890

Richard J. Spiegel is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University in the Program for the History of Science and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. His research focuses on European intellectual, social, and cultural history from 1700, with an emphasis on the history of the humanities and the human sciences. Richard's dissertation looks at the role of philosophical psychology and the language of attention in forming the cultural ideology of the educated middle-class in central Europe. He is published in the British Journal for the History of Science, and his work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion, and the Social Sciences Research Council, among other organizations. Richard holds a B.A. (First-Class Honors) and an M.A., both in history from McGill University. He completed his general examinations at Princeton in 2016 with a major field in Modern Science (Michael Gordin) and minor fields in Eighteenth-Century Europe (David Bell) and Intellectual History (Anthony Grafton). In a previous life, Richard co-wrote an award-winning, feature-length documentary.