Jake Sirota

My research, teaching, and writing focus on the conceptual history of crisis and its relationship to religion and its study. I explore how we have come to see ourselves as inhabiting a world in perpetual crisis, and what follows from thinking of ourselves this way. My work traces the entanglements of providential theologies of history, financialization, race and the Atlantic slave trade, and literary form, combining methods of cultural and intellectual history with psychoanalysis and deconstruction.

As my dissertation project shows, the transitions we narrate as “modernity” can be fruitfully, if partially, understood through religious, cultural, and structural changes that occur in England between 1690-1720. During this period, providence, long understood to be history’s engine, was recast as theories of self-organization and emergent order. At the same time, financial economics entered state fiscal planning, bound up with the development of the trade in enslaved Africans. This relationship was theorized by authors like Daniel Defoe, whose turn to the novel as a literary genre occurred right as these new economic forms resulted in the first “modern” financial crisis, the South Sea Bubble of 1720. I question what it is that makes this crisis “modern,” including the presumption that theology had been excised from theories of history, and how narratives of crisis itself have shaped our expectations of how history functions and flows. Ultimately, I ask how these limits of narration enable or foreclose various forms of response.

I also have tertiary interests in the history and anthropology of food and cuisine, and have worked as a chef and researcher in restaurants around the world. Before coming to the University of Chicago, I studied Anthropology and Philosophy at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia.

Personal Website: https://www.jakesirota.com/