Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the "Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world.

William Clark argues that the research university--which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to...