He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Within the area of his research, the intellectual history of Enlightenment Germany and Scotland, he has written most extensively about aesthetic theory and moral philosophy in the first half of the eighteenth century, the subject of his first book. He is now beginning a project on the concept of “medicine for the mind” in the early Enlightenment, focusing on German Pietist understandings of original sin and the way those understandings informed hermeneutic theory, textual exegesis, reading, and other devotional practices.