Cade is a PhD student in English (Literary Studies) with a minor in the history of science, medicine, and technology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his research explores the intersections of literary criticism, history and philosophy of science, and intellectual history. He holds an MA in English from the University of Vermont (2023) and a BA in philosophy and sociology from the University of Northern Iowa (2020). He was previously a Fulbright Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the University of Ljubljana. He is also a co-director of the Modernism and Contemporary Colloquium.
My work investigates the entangled histories of language, science, and humanism in the 20th and 21st centuries, attending to the transatlantic circuits through which French theory, Cold War sciences and statecraft, and literary aesthetics converged. Tracing the intellectual legacy of structuralism, I examine how the sign has been transformed by encounters with cybernetics, information theory, biology, ecology, and media. Further, I ask how literature and aesthetics have thought through these transformations: what remains when the sign is coded, when it becomes life, when absorbed into systems of control? This line of inquiry draws on three converging areas: the history of language, the anthropological construction of the human, and the rise of high modernism in science, culture, and art.
More broadly, my research is animated by the tension between “philosophies of the concept” and “philosophies of life.” This has led me into theories of abstraction, the history of the human sciences, semiotics, psychoanalysis, historical epistemology, humanism and its critiques, the gothic, and the environmental humanities.
In the classroom, I bring these questions to bear on the forms and media that influence social life. In composition courses, I ask students to attend to the rhetorical work of aesthetic form and narrative historiography. In environmental literature, we trace how narratives structure our relation to risk, catastrophe, and the nonhuman. In law and literature, we examine how legal language constructs persons, obligations, and the narrative blueprint of criminal justice. And in media studies, we ask what happens to self and society when meaning migrates from page to screen, when the sign becomes code, image, interface. Teaching students to read critically means teaching them to see the systems that structure meaning and the remainders those systems cannot contain.
