Jesse L. Rosenberger Work-in-Progress Seminar Series: Jonathon Catlin, "Permanent Catastrophe: The Lives of a Concept from WWI to the Climate Crisis"

Jonathon Catlin, PhD

Humanities Center External Postdoctoral Fellow

Jonathon Catlin is a modern European intellectual historian who joined the Humanities Center as a postdoctoral associate in September 2023, after earning his PhD in History and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton. His dissertation is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought, from the First World War to climate change, with a focus on German and Jewish thinkers including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Jonathon’s research has been supported by a Fulbright Research Grant to Germany, where he was a visiting researcher at Berlin’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, and, most recently, by the Berlin Program at Freie Universität Berlin. His work has been published in History and Theory, Memory Studies, Radical Philosophy, Antisemitism Studies, and edited volumes about Zygmunt Bauman and environmental apocalypse. He has also written on topics including Holocaust memory, the Covid pandemic, and representations of climate catastrophe for a number of popular venues, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, HuffPost, The Point, The Spectator, and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, where he is a contributing editor. Jonathon holds a BA in Jewish Studies and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts from the University of Chicago and an MA in Philosophy from KU Leuven in Belgium.