An Evening With Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

About this event

The genealogical method—a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry. In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference. Provocative and timely, The Genealogy of Genealogy offers both a diagnosis and a vision, challenging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to rethink how we write history and whether our most trusted methods are fit for the futures we seek to build. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is currently Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. Storm received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, his MA from Harvard University, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, Harvard University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient in France, and Universität Leipzig in Germany. Storm is a historian and philosopher of the human sciences.  His archival research, in multiple languages, traces how the categories of religion and science have been constructed, contested, and remade across Europe and East Asia. His philosophical work engages core questions of knowledge, power, and meaning within the human sciences. He is the author of nearly forty articles and book chapters in English, French, Spanish, and Japanese, as well as four-monographs: The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), and The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History (2026) all published by University of Chicago Press.