Matthew Day

My primary area of interest is classical and contemporary social theory, broadly construed. In other words, I’m not all that interested in “religion” per se. Rather, I take the well-documented human proclivity for trafficking with gods, ghosts, and spirits as an entry point for exploring the historically contingent nature of collective life. This helps to explain why I've written about such disparate topics as:

• Evolutionary taxonomies, anti-essentialism, and the “religion” category;
• Jacobean natural philosophy and the early-modern science of money;
• The cross-fertilization of Biblical criticism and evolutionary theory in the late-nineteenth century;
• The medicalization of political dissent in Georgian England;
• Household debt as a key component of class and capital property-relations after the Second World War