Christopher Wild originally launched the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse in 2017, while he was overseeing undergraduate education in the humanities as Master of the Humanities Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of the College. Its creation was informed by his work on the Committee on University Discipline for Disruptive Conduct, as he recognized that principles and policies alone are insufficient to help students in the College avail themselves of free inquiry and expression and engage in the many forms of public discourse, including protest; and, furthermore, by growing up in post-war Germany and the conviction that democracy depends on a flourishing public sphere and robust public discourse.
By vocation and training he is a scholar and teacher of Germany and Central Europe from the late middle ages through the Enlightenment. His work is situated at the intersection of literature, theater history, philosophy, and religious thought; and his research has two distinct and at times overlapping focal points: one the one hand, the role and impact of religious thought and practice in processes and phenomena considered genuinely modern and secular; and on the other hand, the mediality and formal semantics of European and German theater from its beginning in ancient Greece through Modernism.