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


	Dr. Charlotte M. Craig is a Lecturer of German in the Department of German at Rutgers University. A United States citizen born in Czechoslovakia, she received her B.A. from the University of Puget Sound, her M.A. from the University of Arizona, and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She has previously taught at the University of Kansas, George Washington University, and Schiller International University in Heidelberg, Germany. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, she is the author of Christoph Martin Wieland as the Originator of the Modern Travesty in German Literature and contributing editor of Lichtenberg. Essays Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of His Birth (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). She has served as General Editor of the series, The Enlightenment: German and Interdisciplinary Studies (Peter Lang, New York). The Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professorship has been funded annually since 1998 through generous support from Dr. Charlotte M. Craig.

		Current Visiting Professor

		Spring 2013 · Henry Sussman
		Henry Sussman is a Professor of German at Yale University. His books include: Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (2011), Idylls of the Wanderer: Outside in Literature and Theory (2007), The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, and Religion (2005), The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (1997). He is currently working on a book titled Healing, Systematically: or, Playful Intelligence.

		Past Professors

		Fall 2011· Professor Barbara Hahn
		Barbara Hahn is a Distinguished Professor of German at Vanderbilt University. Her books include: »Antworten Sie mir«. Rahel Levin Varnhagens Briefwechsel (1990); Unter falschem Namen. Von der schwierigen Autorschaft der Frauen (1991); Die Jüdin Pallas Athene. Auch eine Theorie der Moderne (2002; engl.: 2005); Hannah Arendt – Leidenschaften, Menschen und Bücher (2005). In 2011, she published Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s “Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freundin” (6 vol.). She is currently writing a book on dreams in the 20th century and one on Hannah Arendt’s encounters with American poets.

		Spring 2011· Professor Eva Geulen
		Professor Eva Geulen studied German and Philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Germany and The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where she received her Ph.D. in 1989. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral at Stanford University in 1989/90, Assistant and Associate Professor of German at the University of Rochester and New York University. Since 2003 she has been Professor of German Literature at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her recent publications include "The End of Art. Readings in a Rumor after Hegel", Stanford Press 2006, "Giorgio Agamben. Eine Einführung" (2nd edition 2008) as well as essays on Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Goethe, Grillparzer, Raabe, Stifter, Thomas Mann and others. She is currently working on Goethe's morphology and its reception in the 20-century philosophy and literature.

		Spring 2010· Professor Gabriele Schwab
		Gabriele Schwab received her Ph. D. in English, American and Romance Literatures at the University of Konstanz, Germany, in 1976 and her Ph. D. in Psychoanalysis from the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles in 2009. She is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Faculty Associate in the Department of Anthropology as well as a member and former Director of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California at Irvine. She is also a member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis and is practicing as a psychoanalyst in Newport Beach. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Heisenberg Fellowship and was a Research Fellow in Residence at the Australian National University, the Free University in Berlin and at the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU. Her books in English include Subjects without Selves. Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (Harvard UP, 1994), The Mirror-and the Killer-Queen. Otherness in Literary Language (Indiana UP, 1997 ) Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, co-edited with William Maurer,(Columbia UP, 2006), and Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (Columbia UP, 2008). She has co-edited a Special Issue of Postcolonial Studies titled The Cultural Unconscious and the Postcolonizing Process and an expanded version will appear in book form titled The Postcolonial Unconscious. Her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. A book titled Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma is in press with Columbia UP. Works in progress include a book titled Imaginary Ethnographies and a collection of essays, co-edited with Philomena Essed, titled Cloning Cultures. She is also working with Native American writer Simon J. Ortiz on a collaborative book of creative non-fiction titled Children of Fire, Children of Water.

		Spring 2009 · Professor Willi Goetschel
		Willi Goetschel is Professor of German and Philosophy at the University of Toronto where he also teaches at the Centre for Jewish Studies and is Associate Member of the Centre for Comparative Literature. Before, he taught at Columbia University and Bard College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his lic. phil. -- an M. Phil equivalent -- from the University of Zurich. He is the author of "Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine" (2003) and "Constituting Critique: Kant's Writing as Critical Praxis" (1994). His most recent publication, "Mein 1933", is a photo essay that presents a text by Hermann Levin Goldschmidt along with pictures by Edith Moos. He is also the editor of the collected works of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt and the president of the Foundation Dialogik, Switzerland. He has served as executive editor and is senior editor of The Germanic Review. His teaching and research includes modern German literature and thought, modern Jewish thought, and critical theory.

		Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 · Professor Peter Demetz
		Sterling Professor Emeritus of Germanic Language and Literature, Yale University His most recent book, "Prague in Black and Gold," is a history and personal memoir of the city which was home and inspiration to many towering figures of European civilization such as Kepler, Mozart, Rabbi Judah Loew, Dvorak, Smetana, Rilke and Kafka. Other books by Demetz include "Marx, Engels and the Poets" and "After the Fires: Writing in the Germanies, Austria and Switzerland." Demetz was awarded a Medal of Merit in the fields of scholarship and culture from the Czech Republic in 2000. Previously Demetz has won two other major awards for his outstanding contributions to the study of German culture. In 1971 he received the Golden Goethe Award of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1984 he was given the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit by the German government. Demetz earned his first doctorate from Charles University in Prague in 1948. After immigrating to the United States and earning a master's degree at Columbia University, he went on to receive a Ph.D from Yale, where he served on the faculty from 1956 until his retirement 1991.

		Spring 2007 · Professor Eric Downing
		Professor Eric Downing is Professor of Comparative Literature and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1987), his M.A. from UC-Berkeley (1980), and his from B.A. Swarthmore (1977). His primary literatures are German, classical Greek, and Latin. Before coming to UNC-Chapel Hill, he was John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, where he taught courses in both Comparative and German Literature. His courses in Comparative Literature include classes in literary theory, the history of poetics, eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, aestheticism, and several on ancient-modern relations. His teaching in German has concentrated on narrative fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, but includes courses on Nietzsche, Freud, and Walter Benjamin. He also holds an adjunct position in the Department of Classical Studies. In 2004 he was presented with the Johnson Award for Excellence in Teaching.

		Spring 2006 · Professor Lynne Tatlock
		Professor Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University and her research interests include nationalism and regionalism, reader communities, 17th and 19th century German literature and culture, women's writing, literary translation, literature and medicine, the novel, film, gender, and feminist theory and criticism.

		Spring 2005 · Professor Jane Brown
		Professor Jane Brown received her PhD from Yale University in 1971. She is Professor of Germanics and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington and former president of the Goethe Society of North America. Best known for her work on Goethe's Faust, she has also written, edited and translated numerous books and articles on Droste-Hülshoff, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Schubert. Her books include Ironie und Objektivität: Aufsätze zu Goethe (1999), Psychomachia: Allegory and Classical Form in European Drama and, with Marshall Brown, a translation of Harald Weinrich's Linguistics of Lying and other Essays.

		Spring 2004 · Professor David Constantine
		A freelance writer and translator, David Constantine studied modern languages at Wadham College in Oxford, with his doctoral dissertation over the poetry of Hölderlin. He is married with two children. His works include The Pelt of Wasps (1998) and Something for the Ghosts (2002).

		Spring 2003 · Professor Jeffrey Sammons
		Professor Jeffrey Sammons received his BA from Yale College in 1958 and his PhD from Yale University in 1962. From 1988-1991 he served as the Chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale, and in 1999 he was inducted as an Honorary Member of the American Association of Teachers of German. His experience has taken him all over the world, conducting lectures and public appearances in the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Norway, the Netherlands, Israel, and China. His books include Shifting Fortunes of Wilhelm Raabe (1991) and Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy (1998).

		Spring 2002 · Professor Alice Kuzniar
		Professor Kuzniar received her BA from the University of Toronto in 1978 and her MA and PhD from Princeton University in 1980 and 1983 respectively. She holds a joint appointment with German and Comparative Literature at University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill. She transformed her dissertation into a book entitled Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin (University of Georgia Press, 1987), which was the winner of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Award. In combining her interests in Romanticism and the visual arts (the links between E. T. A. Hoffmann's story Der Sandmann and David Lynch's cult classic Blue Velvet) resulted in an article entitled "Ears looking at you." She edited a book with Stanford University Press entitled Outing Goethe and His Age (1996), a volume that employs historical, biographical, and textual evidence to paint a cohesive picture of the incontrovertibly sexual nature of same-sex relations during this period. Her two current major interests, cinema and gay studies merged, resulted in her to writing The Queer German Cinema (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

		Spring 2001 · Professor John A. McCarthy
		Professor McCarthy received his B.A. from Oakland University, Michigan, and his Ph.D., in 1972, from the State University of New York, Buffalo. His books include Fantasy and Reality: An Epistemological Approach to Wieland (1974); C.M. Wieland: The Man and His Work (1979); and Crossing Boundaries: A Theory and History of Essayistic Writing in German (1680-1815) (1989; winner of the 1990 DAAD-GSA prize for the best book on German literature published in North America 1988-1990). His many other publications include examinations of such authors as Goethe, Lessing, and Herder; and focus additionally on such topics as the history of Germanics in the U.S., connections between literature and philosophy, the German and European Enlightenment, and language pedagogy. A recipient of many national and international awards, Professor McCarthy is Professor of German & Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt.

		Spring 2000 · Professor Walter H. Sokel
		Professor Sokel received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Rutgers in 1941 and 1944, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1953. In subsequent decades he published widely on such authors as Brecht, Böll, Canetti, Musil, Rilke, Broch, and Thomas Mann, establishing himself as an internationally recognized authority on Kafka and German Expressionism. His awards include the AATG Prize for best essay in the German Quarterly (1979) and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize, bestowed by the Federal Republic of Germany (1982). He has taught as visiting professor at the University of Hamburg (1965), Harvard University (1978-79), the University of Freiburg (1985), the University of Graz (1985, 1988, 1990) and, as Walker-Ames Distinguished Professor of German, at the University of Washington (1991). He is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Virginia.

		Spring 1999 · Professor Egon Schwarz
		Professor Schwarz received his M.A. at The Ohio State University and his Ph.D. at the University of Washington (1954), and is now Rosa May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Washington University (St. Louis). His distinguished teaching career has included visiting professorships at universities in the U.S., Germany, New Zealand, and Austria. Among his many publications are books on Eichendorff, Rilke, and Hofmannsthal, as well as a vast array of articles and reviews that have appeared both in scholarly journals and such newspapers as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and Die Zeit. His recent work includes writings on exile literature, Jewish life in Germany and Austria, and the literature and culture of early 20th-century Vienna.

		Spring 1998 · Professor Wulf Koepke
		Professor Koepke received his Ph.D. in 1955 at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His teaching career has included positions in Europe, Asia, and the United States, where he joined the faculty of Texas A&M University in 1971. His long list of publications contains important monographs on Jean Paul Richter, Lion Feuchtwanger, Johann Gottfried Herder and Max Frisch, as well as numerous editions, textbooks and classroom materials, over fifty articles, many book chapters, and over 140 reviews in leading journals in the area of German Studies. Professor Koepke stands out as a central figure in this field, and in particular as an expert in the literature of the Age of Goethe. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German from Texas A&M, and currently lives and works in Massachusetts.

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Last Updated: 02/06/2013