DERMAN, Joshua

Max Weber Fellow, 2008-2009

From September 2010:

Assistant Professor
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Hong Kong

Email hmderman@ust.hk  / Joshua_Derman@yahoo.com  

Derman Homepage 
  

  

 

 

Joshua Derman will receive his Ph.D. in modern European history from Princeton University in the summer of 2008. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University, and following graduation, worked for two years at the new Jewish Museum of Berlin, helping to design and develop interactive installations for the permanent exhibition.

His dissertation, “A Legacy Transformed: The Reception of Max Weber in German and American Thought, 1920–1950,” seeks to understand how the German economist and sociologist Max Weber came to be regarded as a canonical figure in the social sciences by the mid-twentieth century. It documents the explosion of interest in his ideas—methodological concepts, theories about the origins of capitalism, political thought and cultural criticism—among German intellectuals, and illuminates the variety of interpretations and appropriations to which his work was initially subjected. It also examines how American and émigré scholars translated Weber’s ideas into the vernacular of social science, and how they channeled a diffuse set of discourses into a specialized research agenda.

His current research interests include (1) the history of academic specialization and the rise of the modern research university, in particular from the perspective of philosophical debates about the value of humanistic scholarship, and (2) the discourse about socio-economic planning among American, British and German-speaking émigré intellectuals in the mid-1940s.