THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Currently: Since graduating from the Committee in 2022 with a dissertation on Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead," I've continued to think about the theme of modernity in Continental philosophy and beyond. I've done this via academic routes, continuing to publish work especially on Nietzsche and Heidegger, and public-facing routes, writing for Point magazine and a monthly bilingual column for the Romanian magazine Anthropos called "Modern Passions." I've held a fellowship teaching in the Sosc core at Chicago, a visiting professorship at Deep Springs College (where I learned how to ride horses, drove cattle, and gardened with students), and (currently) a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovak Academy of the Sciences. My latest and upcoming projects can be found at matmesserschmidt.com.
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Previously: In 2022-2023, Mat Messerschmidt was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Division of the Social Sciences and the Committee on Social Thought. He received his PhD from Social Thought in 2022.
Mat’s research focuses on Continental philosophy from Nietzsche onwards. His work often takes the approach of philosophy of religion. Secularization and philosophy’s engagement with Christianity are enduring interests of his.
His current book project explores Nietzsche’s famous statement, “God is dead,” in dialogue with responses to this Nietzschean idea by well-known twentieth-century philosophers and theologians such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion. The project shows how Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity is informed by his conviction that the human being must always be considered as an embodied human being – that combating Christianity means saving the human body from Christianity, for him.
As a graduate instructor, Mat taught courses on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the topic of secularization, in German, Social Thought, and Religious Studies. In 2022-2024, he is teaching in the “Self, Culture, and Society” sequence in the Social Sciences Core, and in Winter 2024, he is teaching a course on 20th-century Continental philosophy.
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