Jennifer Stitt, a PhD candidate in the History Department at UW-Madison, has been featured in an article from Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information on the cultural history of solitude and the practice of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stitt is writing her dissertation, titled “Seeking Solitude: Imagining Self and Society in America” under the advisement of intellectual historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. In the feature piece, Stitt discusses the differences between solitude, loneliness, and isolation; the relationship between vita contemplativa(the pensive life) and vita activa (the active life) in the history of philosophy; and the ways in which, during our time of social distancing, solitude is solidarity.
To read the article, see Dagbladet Information.