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356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity
06/08/2026
356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity
All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, humanity, and the self. Andrea Wulf is a writer of narrative histories, examining the origins of ideas through the lives of the people who explored them. In this episode we discuss three of her books: , about Alexander von Humboldt and environmentalism; , about the Jena circle of Romantics including Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and others; and most recently , about George Forster, an early naturalist, ethnographer, and champion of human equality. Blog post with transcript: Support Mindscape on . Andrea Wulf was born in India, raised in Germany, and studied design history at the Royal College of Art, London. She is the author of seven books. She is a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Invention of Nature won multiple prizes, including the Royal Society science book prize and the LA Times book prize.
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