Christian Haines, Associate Professor of English

Jonathan Abel, Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese

The Working Group on Capital and Culture is a group composed of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students focusing on the study of capitalism, cultural production, and intellectual history. The group’s primary mission consists in gathering together the different humanistic inquiries into how capitalism shapes culture and society. Put differently, we imagine the group as a platform on which humanistic methods (close reading, translation, archival recovery, philosophical reflection, and the like) can exercise their efforts on an object too often abandoned to the social sciences: capitalist society. The group operates on the premise that the economy is too significant an element in human existence to leave to the economists.