Ian F. McNeely, Lisa Wolverton

Ian F. McNeely is an historian of knowledge. He teach and write about “practical intellectuals” who apply knowledge to society’s big challenges—like reforming public health, reconstructing civil society, and reinventing institutions of higher learning. Although he was trained in modern German history and European cultural history, and remain active in those fields. He also have deep roots in global, comparative history and in social theory.

His first two books examined practical intellectuals from within the framework of German history. One of them, "Medicine on a Grand Scale": Rudolf Virchow, Liberalism, and the Public Health, was a short study of one of the nineteenth century's most famous physicians and political reformers. The other, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s-1820s, analyzed the machinations of powerful local scribes (Schreiber) who participated in the profound civic and political transformation of southwestern Germany after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasions.

Lisa Wolverton is an Associate Professor of History in University of Oregon. Her current projects include a study of Czech involvement in the Investiture Contest, essays on Central Europe in the Ottonian era, and, with Jonathan Lyon (University of Chicago), a website dedicated to Slavs and German along the medieval Elbe.