Stephen Kern

Stephen Kern is an American cultural historian and Honorary Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University whose research explores modernism. His books include The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (1983), which examined how technological change reshaped perceptions of temporality and spatiality before and during World War I.

Career

Kern taught at Northern Illinois University, where he became Distinguished Research Professor, before moving to Ohio State in 2002.[1][2] He was appointed Humanities Distinguished Professor there in 2004.[1] He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and won the Ohio Academy of History Distinguished Historian Award in 2007.[1][3]

Work

Kern's first book, Anatomy and Destiny (1975), was a cultural history of the human body.[4][5] His book The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, argued that technologies like the telephone, cinema, automobile, and the airplane, together with developments such as Cubism, psychoanalysis, and relativity theory, produced fundamentally new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space.[6][7][8] Harvard University Press reissued it in 2003 with a new preface.[9]

Subsequent works examined the history of encounter or love (The Culture of Love, 1992),[10][11] the gaze in English and French painting and fiction (Eyes of Love, 1996),[12][13] and changing ideas about causality since 1830, using murder novels as a case study (A Cultural History of Causality, 2004).[14][15][16] The Modernist Novel (2011) offered a formalist analysis of narrative innovation in Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka, and others; Jon Hegglund, reviewing it in Studies in the Novel, called it a welcome counterbalance to scholarship that had become reluctant to discuss modernist form.[17][18] Modernism After the Death of God (2017) argued that key modernist figures — Nietzsche, Joyce, Freud, Lawrence, Gide, Heidegger, and Woolf — turned against Christianity partly over its sexual morality and then built alternative unifying projects.[19][20]

Kern's 2025 book Time and Space in the Internet Age is a sequel to The Culture of Time and Space, comparing two periods of technological upheaval: 1880–1920 and 1980–2020.[21] His book Origins and Foundations in the Modernist Age, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.[22]

Selected works

  • Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (Bobbs-Merrill, 1975)
  • The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983; 2nd ed. 2003)
  • The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Harvard University Press, 1992)
  • Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels (Reaktion Books, 1996)
  • A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton University Press, 2004)
  • The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  • Modernism After the Death of God: Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification (Routledge, 2017)
  • Time and Space in the Internet Age (Routledge, 2025)

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Stephen Kern". Department of History, The Ohio State University. Retrieved March 14, 2026.
  2. ↑ "Stephen Kern". University Communications, Ohio State University. Retrieved March 14, 2026.
  3. ↑ "Stephen Kern, PhD". SRHSB Columbus 2025 Conference. Retrieved March 14, 2026.
  4. ↑ Hoffman Baruch, Elaine (September 1975). "Anatomy and Destiny, by Stephen Kern". Commentary. Retrieved March 14, 2026.
  5. ↑ Verene, Donald Phillip (1977). "Review of Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body". The Journal of Modern History. 49 (3): 488–490. ISSN 0022-2801.
  6. ↑ Rahe, Julia (August 30, 2024). "The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 by Stephen Kern". Not Even Past. Retrieved March 14, 2026.
  7. ↑ Cannadine, David (1984-07-19). "Time, Gentlemen, Please". London Review of Books. Vol. 06, no. 13. ISSN 0260-9592. Retrieved 2026-05-16.
  8. ↑ Wohl, Robert (1985). "Review of The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918". Journal of Social History. 18 (4): 635–641. ISSN 0022-4529.
  9. ↑ Kern, Stephen (2003). The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918: With a New Preface. Harvard University Press.
  10. ↑ Esty, Joshua D. (1993). "The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (review)". MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 39 (2): 423–424. doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0222. ISSN 1080-658X.
  11. ↑ Polhemus, Robert M. (1994). "Review of The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns". Victorian Studies. 37 (2): 335–337. ISSN 0042-5222.
  12. ↑ Hepworth, Mike (1998). "Love, Gender and Morality:: Stephen Kern's Eyes of Love". Theory, Culture & Society. 15 (3–4): 405–415. doi:10.1177/0263276498015003020. ISSN 0263-2764.
  13. ↑ Furst, Lilian R. (1997). "Review of Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Culture, 1840-1900". Comparative Literature Studies. 34 (3): 284–287. ISSN 0010-4132.
  14. ↑ Okun, P. (2006). "Review of A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought". The American Historical Review. 111 (2): 428–429. doi:10.1086/ahr.111.2.428. ISSN 0002-8762.
  15. ↑ Glover, David (2007). "Review of A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought". The Journal of Modern History. 79 (4): 888–890. doi:10.1086/529219. ISSN 0022-2801.
  16. ↑ Eustace, N. (2006). "Review of A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels and Systems of Thought". Journal of Social History. 40 (1): 269–270. doi:10.1353/jsh.2006.0077. ISSN 0022-4529.
  17. ↑ Hegglund, Jon (2014). "The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction by Stephen Kern (review)". Studies in the Novel. 46 (1): 132–133. doi:10.1353/sdn.2014.0022. ISSN 1934-1512.
  18. ↑ Levin, Janina (2014). "Weak Plots in the Modernist Novel: A Review of Stephen Kern's The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction". Journal of Modern Literature. 37 (2): 183–187. doi:10.2979/jmodelite.37.2.183. ISSN 0022-281X.
  19. ↑ "Modernism After the Death of God". Department of History, Ohio State University. Retrieved March 14, 2026.
  20. ↑ Oh, Alicia (2019-04-01). "Stephen Kern . Modernism After the Death of God: Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification. ". The Review of English Studies. 70 (294): 386–389. doi:10.1093/res/hgy097. ISSN 0034-6551.
  21. ↑ Kern, Stephen (2025). Time and Space in the Internet Age. Routledge.
  22. ↑ "Origins and Foundations in the Modernist Age". Edinburgh University Press. Retrieved 2026-05-16.
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