Ken recieved his Ph.D from Fordham University in May, 2010. He is currently an adjunct professor at American International College in Springfield, MA and a Visiting Fellow at UMass-Amherst and is affiliated with the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester. Ken was a Fulbright scholar to France in 2007–2008, has presented at numerous conferences, and has several academic publications to his credit (also listed on the writing page). Click here to download his academic CV (pdf format).
Ken's philosophy is that the scholar must also be a public intellectual. Ultimately, the production of knowledge depends on an audience of consumers. Unless we can justify our inquiries as being useful to this community, explaining the world as it is and offering a fresh insight into the human condition, we are destined for irrelevance and antiquarianism.
Research
Ken's research interests lie in the intersections between social history and intellectual history, or what John Murdoch and Edith Sylla have called “the social context of medieval learning.” Ken's dissertation explores how the milieu of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris contributed to the development of modern ideas of time that, in turn, shaped modern science and economics.
Ken's interest in the confluence of religion, social milieu, and intellectual history also shapes his approach to another one of his interests, medieval expansionism: The ways in which members of medieval cultures related to customs and traditions different from their own were tempered by religious norms, which, in turn, were conditioned by socioeconomic organization. Medieval exploration and colonization thus followed a generalized model: Initial contact between cultures; the invention of a casus belli; the actual military effort; conversion, reconciliation, and intermarriage; the adoption of a new socioeconomic model; and formation of a new, bicultural society.
Ken's interest in Camillo Agrippa’s 1553 Treatise on the Science of Arms and its associated astronomical dialogue likewise springs from the union of his love of fencing and his interest in the deployment of ideas in social context. More than a mere work on aesthetic violence, Agrippa highlights changing ideas of conflict resolution, factional politics, patronage, and court culture, and the way these factors transformed concepts of art, science, the body, sport, and the individual’s behavior in society.
Finally, Ken has long been interested in ideas of love, sex, and gender. Why are our norms the way they are today? How much is rooted in human universals, and how much in social construction? These studies are an entrée to asking deep questions about ourselves and our world: Anthropologists have long recognized that society is organized by how it legitimizes reproduction. Sex and economics are intimately linked. Why did the West develop the idea of individual choice in love? How do we choose our mates? Why is the marriage-equality movement occuring at this particular moment in our social and economic history? By asking such questions, we not only uncover the foundations of Western society, but ask ourselves whether the edifice had to be built the way it was—and if it can be rennovated.