Colin Jager is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He writes and teaches about romantic literature, politics, and culture, about secularism and religion, and about cognitive science. He is the author of articles on all of these topics, published most recently in Qui Parle, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Pedagogy, Romantic Circles Praxis, and Public Culture. From 2006-2008 he was co-leader of the “Mind and Culture” seminar at the CCA; for 2013-2014 he was co-leader of the “Objects and Environments” seminar at the CCA. He is the author of two books: The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007), and Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015). The first studies the ubiquitous presence of the argument from design in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing that its cultural and aesthetic importance undermines the familiar equation of modernization with secularization. The second emphasizes secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, and proposes that romantic-era literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontents that characterize the mood of secular modernity. Professor Jager is now turning his attention to the political possibilities of romanticism, in particular to the connection between cognition, on the one hand, and the environment, on the other.