History, Theory and Abraham Gottlob Werner

In the 1970s at the University of Pittsburgh, I was lucky enough to be part of a faculty discussion group on nineteenth-century studies. Over wine, eight or ten of us from the departments of French, Spanish, German, Art History, Physics, Philosophy, and History and Philosophy of Science discovered, with varying degrees of amazement and shock, the very different ways in which our colleagues tackled the history of a rather extended nineteenth century. One of the group's most regular and valued members was John Neubauer whose wide-ranging interests made it easy for him to cross those disciplinary boundaries and mediate our diverse approaches to the poems, paintings and scientific prose that we studied.