The Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures


		Associate Professor • Undergraduate Director

		nrennie@rci.rutgers.edu
		German House Room 201A
		(732) 932-7201

		Spring 2012 Office Hours:
		Tuesdays, 10:45 am and Thursdays, 9:45 am and by appointment



	Nicholas Rennie is an Associate Professor of German and affiliate member of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, where he has taught courses on such subjects as the Frankfurt School, German Drama, the literature of chaos and order from Dante to the present, contemporary literary theory, and the wise fool as literary figure and device.

Education:
	Professor Rennie has studied at Princeton University, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and, as a Mellon Fellowship recipient, at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1997.

Publications and Research:
	Speculating on the Moment: The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi, and Nietzsche (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). He is currently working on a book project entitled Forbidding Images: Writing and the Visual in German Theory 1766/1939. This study argues that the work of G.E. Lessing and Sigmund Freud marks two key shifts in German literary culture's understanding of the relation between images and words. He has published articles on Lessing, Goethe, Leopardi, Nietzsche, and Benjamin.

Research Interests:
	Literature of the Enlightenment and the Age of Goethe Modern aesthetics and intellectual history The Frankfurt School The 20th-century German novel Literary theory German language

Awards and Honors:
	Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (Spring 2002, Fall 2003) Research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany

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Last Updated: 08/09/2007