Biography
Charles Elder joined the Basic Program staff in 2000 after ten years of undergraduate teaching at the University of Chicago and Valparaiso University. Originally a scholar of religion and psychology—and the author of a critical re-examination of Freud and psychoanalytic thought, The Grammar of the Unconscious: The Conceptual Foundations of Psychoanalysis—his interests have gradually shifted toward more general questions about the relationship between philosophical, literary, and scientific modes of inquiry as integral moments in an emerging human consciousness—and, most recently, to consideration of the meaning and implications of current existential threats for how we understand humanity and the human career—culminating in the “End(s) of Humanity Initiative” and course sequence.
In addition to the Basic Program, he taught for a number of years in the Chicago Odyssey Project, a program that provides college-level humanities education to lower-income adults. He is the author, with Lin Atnip, of an essay, “Reading for Knowledge: Literature and the Grammar of Humanity,” and with Amy Thomas Elder, “Reading Against Apocalypse: The Paradox of Great Books in a Terminal World” (both under review). Prior to his return to graduate school in the mid-eighties, Elder spent a number of years working odd jobs in Alaska and trying (with mixed success) to comprehend directly what philosophers and poets have historically understood by “nature”—at a time when there still was one.