Professor Matthews seeks to cultivate in his students the skills and habits of humanistic inquiry needed to integrate the different fields and disciplines encountered in higher education.  While at Duke he will work with Michael Gillespie, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, participating in his Intellectual History Seminar and his political philosophy group. He also plans to participate in a new course under development by Thomas Pfau of English and Reinhard Hütter of the Divinity School, “The University: what it is, and why it matters,” that addresses the very theme of his research activity.  His primary research activity will be to translate Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s seminal lectures on "The Method of Academic Studies" (1802), in which he argues that freedom of inquiry is the absolute value defining the modern university and provides an historical model and a theoretical justification for integrative learning.