Christian Flow is a historian of scholarship whose work examines material, cultural, and technical elements of Latin and Greek study since the Renaissance. Since 2022 he has been an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, with an appointment in the Shackouls Honors College. After completing his PhD at Princeton University, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. His research has been supported by the Mississippi State Strategic Research Initiative, the DAAD, and the Herzog-Ernst-Stipendium der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. He has published in Modern Intellectual History, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, and Journal for the History of Knowledge. His book, Philological Observation: Seeing, Science, and the Latin Lexicon, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. 

Christian Flow’s project as a NOMIS Fellow looks at the tools and training of classical philologists in and around the German university, particularly in the period of its dominance in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He is interested in how, in this setting, the technical problem of “making visible” new insights about language “on page” has been part of a larger sense-making operation “off page.” The aim is to tell a history of attempts to structure the visual attentions of scholars of antiquity in the equipping and Alltag of the seminars and exercises that helped to create professional readers and teachers. The university seminar, in particular, was a site meant to bring students into close contact with professors, whose charismatic visual capacities were remarked by their charges. But our understanding of just how the eyes of seminar-participants were honed is lacking and stands to gain much from early, untapped, or neglected non-bureaucratic sources, particularly in the Latin that long remained the philological seminar’s lingua franca. Among the subjects of Flow’s work is the Basel-born Latinist Eduard Wölfflin (1831-1908), whose notions of trained sight he is hoping to contextualize generationally, not least against those of his son, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945).