James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame.

There he taught in the History Department and the doctoral program in History and Phi­losophy of Science until retiring in 2014. 

Turner’s research centers on British and American in­tellectual history from the late eight­eenth to the early twentieth century. In more recent years he has taken special interest in the his­tory of academic knowledge. His eight books include Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (1980); Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbe­lief in America (1985); The Liberal Educa­tion of Charles Eliot Norton (1999); and Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (2014). The last won the Christian Gauss Award for literary scholarship. Turner is currently writing a history of disciplinarity as the dom­inant framework for organizing academic knowledge in the United States.