Education

• B.A. in Philosophy, Yale University
• M.A. in History, University of Chicago
• Ph.D. in History, University of Chicago

Biography: 

I received my BA in Philosophy from Yale University and my PhD from the University of
Chicago. Before coming to USC, I held postdoctoral fellowships at Brown University and the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. I came to USC in 2012 to serve as associate director of the Center for Digital Humanities, the campus hub for research in Digital Humanities. At the time CDH was housed in the Thomas Cooper Library and I was a member of the Library faculty. I joined the USC History Department as an assistant professor in 2016. I was promoted to associate professor of history with tenure in 2024.

Scholarship

I have two areas of historical scholarship. One is the history of European classical liberalism, specifically in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here I focus on the history of ideas about freedom and law, constitutionalism and republicanism in Central Europe. My principal focus has been on the Hessian and Rhine-Main region of Germany around Frankfurt am Main. This research area also connects up with my teaching at the University of South Carolina (see below). The second research area is Digital History. For me Digital History involves the  study, refinement, and application of digital methods such as “distant reading” to research questions within early modern history. More specifically, my research involves a cluster of related problems in early modern history, specifically around liberalism and property law in early  modern society. The Digital History work in turn involves digital methods such as “distant reading”.

I have published scholarship in Digital History and German History, in top-level academic venues, for over a decade. Specific contributions have been in empirical German history, the historical sociology of German law, historical bibliometrics, tools for computational text analysis, refinements of existing software methods for data cleaning and computer vision, and applications of some of these methods to history and archaeology. To date (Summer 2024) I have produced 1 scholarly monograph, 1 edited volume, 11 peer-reviewed journal or other scholarly articles and essays, 2 invited essays, 1 digital review, and a partridge in a pear tree (plus related software). I have essentially spent half of my time since 2010 studying, applying, and writing about digital methods, and the other half pursuing traditional interpretive empirical scholarship in early modern German legal and political thought. My monograph, Property and the German Idea of Freedom, from the End of the Thirty Years’ War to the Eve of the French Revolution in Germany, was published by Brill in 2024.

My next scholarly adventures are coalescing in two directions. One is the history of public finance in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Public finance is how states raise and spend revenues, including taxation, borrowing, war, administration, and social welfare, to name only the major categories. This area of research grows out of the property rights focus of my early work (articles and talks 2009-2015, book 2024), in particular theories of economic development and property rights. The second research area, also continuing from earlier work (various, 2015-2022), is on what might be called the history of canons and canonicity – that is, reading lists of important published books. One obvious outlet and application of this is in the modern notion of a Western Canon of Great Books. I myself had the benefit and pleasure of studying many great works of literature and philosophy in seminar settings in college and graduate school and have always taken an interest in masterpieces of literature, art, philosophy, and history. As a matter of historical research, I have written about the history of library collections in Germany (2022), using methods of digital text analysis. This new project specifically continues that thread. I will be using an Achieve grant from USC to produce a distant reading analysis of library catalogs of some 10,000 books held in collections in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in major universities, abbeys, cathedrals schools, private, and other collections. The goal will be to see what major research institutions considered to be great books at pivotal periods in European history.

Teaching and Professional Service

My teaching at USC corresponds to my scholarship of course, albeit adapted to Departmental and student needs. I have taught courses on Digital history, German history (HIST 338), modern European history (HIST 102), the history of constitutionalism and republicanism (HIST 467, 470), and the history of capitalism and business (HIST 370, 377, 778).

Within these I have developed a specialization in the history of business, political economy, capitalism, and monetary policy in the European and American contexts. This goes back to my pre-USC teaching experiences at the University of Chicago and Brown, where I taught courses like “Law, Liberty, and Property in European History”, “Prosperity and Poverty: The History, Politics, and Ethics of National Wealth”, and “The Emergence of Capitalism”. Building on my research into the history of European liberalism, I am now moving to adding to the Department’s Founding Documents (REACH Act) curriculum in constitutional history and the history of republicanism, both in the American founding era and especially in its British, continental European, and ancient roots. This begins with HIST 470: The History of American Constitutionalism. I have also developed a related course, HIST 467: The History of Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Europe, which explores similar themes in earlier periods – antiquity, Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.

I also perform professional service work at the Departmental, university, and national and
international levels based on these specializations. I have held leadership positions in national and international professional academic enterprises related to both Digital and European history.              
(See bio and work also at https://colinwilder.academia.edu/.)