Comparative Literature

Curriculum Vitae

Over the course of the nineteenth century, European conceptions of risk were severed from ideas of fate and morality, with risk increasingly viewed as a necessary component of a technological system.  Systemic risk, unlike winds of fate or acts of God, could be quantified, calculated, managed, and insured against.  My research project centers upon a single decade—the 1860s—that marks the crystallization of the modern discourse of systemic risk, a discourse constituted at the intersection of medicine, psychology, law, economics, and aesthetics.  The emergence of modern conceptions of risk, I argue, produced strikingly analogous developments within each of these five areas.

Matthew Wilson Smith is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University.  His interests include modern theatre history and theory, relations between theatre and early film, and digital media.  His first book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (2007) presents a history and theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk in relation to technology and mass culture, placing such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy.  He is also the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, a Norton Critical Edition (2012), and serves on the editorial board of Modern Drama.  He is currently at work on a study of the parallel emergence of modern theatre and modern neurology in nineteenth-century Europe, and is co-editing a volume of essays on opera and modernism.  His plays have been performed at The Eugene O’Neill Theatre, The Ontological Theater at St. Mark’s, Henry Street Settlement, and other stages. 

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