Yoav Levinson-Sela

Yoav is a History Ph.D. student specializing in early modern Europe. His research focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and the moral communities of knowers sustaining it, particularly in northern German Protestant universities and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is interested in the ways the technical aspects and pedagogical injunctions of academic knowledge production were embodied within scholarly lifestyles on the one hand and translated into institutional and communal ideals on the other.

Before coming to Stanford, Yoav completed a master's degree at Tel-Aviv University, with a thesis on ordering scholarly knowledge and the moral critique of scholars in early eighteenth-century academic dissertations. The thesis attempted to place that moral critique, thus far interpreted as reflecting a decline of late humanist scholarship, in the context of a continuous pedagogical and technical discussion among scholars about the content and methods of academic scholarship. More broadly, he is interested in the history of knowledge, the social and cultural history of science and the humanities, the history of education and universities, and the material history of books.