Modern intellectual history and political thought Most of my work falls into the field of German and European modern intellectual history and political thought, and I am also Co-Director, with Peter C. Caldwell, of Rice’s new program in Politics, Law & Social Thought. Within the wider context of modern intellectual history, I am mainly interested in varieties of political realism, especially as they focus on the relationship between political citizenship and the modern state, and also in the manifestations of political citizenship in an increasingly postnational world. Currently, I am working on Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt, but also on more recent political thinkers, such as Jürgen Habermas, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. A second line of inquiry is concerned with the emergence of normativity and philosophical naturalism. Apart from my publications on Nietzsche, this interest has also led me to an ongoing research project on the history of "epistemic images," from nineteenth-century images of bacteria to contemporary fMRI scans, which is informed by current debates about philosophical naturalism and new materialism.