The Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professorship is a position filled each spring by a renowned professor in German Studies. The professorship has been funded since 1998 by a generous annual gift from Dr. Charlotte M. Craig. As a result of her generosity, the German Department has welcomed a distinguished faculty member from schools foreign and domestic each spring semester to teach a graduate course, an undergraduate course, and to deliver the ever-successful annual Craig Lecture. The professors who have held the position of Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor are listed below. 

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.

Fall 2023 - Professor Elisabeth Weber (University of California, Santa Barbara)

E Weber 2022Elisabeth Weber is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an instructor for the ‘Foundations in the Humanities’ Prison Pedagogy Correspondence Program of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC Santa Barbara, and teaches for the Scholars At Risk Network USA. Her book publications include Verfolgung und Trauma. Zu Emmanuel Lévinas’ Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1990) and Kill Boxes. Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare (2017). She is also the editor of Questions au Judaïsme, a collection of interviews with, among others, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard (1996, English translation 2004), and of Living Together. Jacques Derrida's Communities of Violence and Peace (2013). Together with Julie Carlson she co-edited Speaking about Torture (2012).
She currently works on environmental humanities, in particular literary and philosophical plant studies.

 


 

Spring 2023 - Professor Jan Mieszkowski (Reed College)

Spring 2023 Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30pm - 1:30pm, and by appointment

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Jan Mieszkowski is the Reginald F. Arragon Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. A specialist in modern European literature and philosophy, he has pursued comparative and interdisciplinary studies of a broad range of topics in post-Enlightenment thought with a particular focus on aesthetics and politics. Jan’s first book, Labors of Imagination (Fordham, 2006), offered a new account of the relationship between Romanticism and classical political economy by showing how both traditions embraced production as a model of intellectual and material praxis. In Watching War (Stanford, 2012), he argued that the Romantic era saw a profound shift in political culture as warfare came to be understood as a mass spectacle. In Crises of the Sentence (Chicago, 2019), he proposed that the concept of the sentence has played a crucial but largely unacknowledged role in literary discourses. Jan is currently completing a monograph about the poetics of botany.

 

 

 

 


Spring 2019 - Professor Claudia Benthien (University of Hamburg)

Spring 2019 Office Hours: Tuesdays, 1:30pm-3pm
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CB Website IfGDr. Claudia Benthien is professor at the Institute for German Language and Literature, Univ­ersity of Hamburg. She is a widely published specialist in German literature and culture from 1600 to the present whose work focuses on cultural theory, gender studies, intellectual history, aesthetics as well as performance and intermedial studies. Her historical foci include the German Baroque, literature around 1800, literary Modernism, and contemporary arts and culture. 

She is the author of Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (Co­lum­bia UP, 2002), for which she received the Tiburtius dissertation award 1999 of the Berlin Senate. She has also published a monograph on the rhetoric and performativity of silence in the 17th century (Barockes Schweigen. Rhetorik und Performativität des Sprach­losen im 17. Jahrhundert; Fink, 2006). A third book of hers examines the intersection of notions of shame and guilt cultures around 1800 with close readings of four tragedies by Schiller and Kleist (Tribunal der Blicke. Kulturtheorien von Scham und Schuld und die Tragödie um 1800; Böhlau, 2011). Dr. Benthien’s most recent research project Literarizität in der Medienkunst, funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation; 2014-2018), investigated the aesthetics of oral and scriptural language in emerging forms of artistic expression. The project was based on the observation that literature, poetic elements and structures as well as literary sources play a significant role in many media artworks. It resulted in the recent book publication The Literariness of Media Art, written together with Jordis Lau and Maraike M. Marxsen (Routledge, 2019). Claudia Benthien is co-editor of the book series Handbücher zur Kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie (with De Gruyter) and co-edited the first vol­ume, a comprehensive handbook on literature and visual culture (2014).

At Rutgers she is teaching an undergraduate seminar on “Literature and Media Art” and a graduate seminar on “Vanitas: Transcience and Death in Early Modern and Contemporary Culture”.

 


Spring 2018 - Professor Bernhard Dotzler (University of Regensburg)

Spring 2018 Office Hours: Wednesdays, 3-4pm
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Bernhard J. Dotzler, Professor (chair) of Media Studies, University of Regensburg. PhD, Humboldt University Berlin, 1995, Habilitation, TU Berlin, 2004. Bernhard Dotzler's research interests include literature and science as well as media and science, the history of computing, and the archeology of media. Author of Der Hochstapler: Thomas Mann und die Simulakren der Literatur (1991), Papiermaschinen: Versuch über Communication & Control in Literatur und Technik (1996), L'Inconnue de l'art: Über Medien-Kunst (2003), Diskurs und Medium: Zur Archäologie der Computerkultur (2006), Diskurs und Medium II: Das Argument der Literatur (2010), Diskurs und Medium III: Philologische Untersuchungen – Medien und Wissen in literaturgeschichtlichen Beispielen (2011), and Mediengeschichte als Historische Techno-Logie (2017).

 


Spring 2017 - Professor Susanne Luedemann (Ludwig-Maximilians-University)

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Foto KonstanzSusanne Luedemann has been a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany, since 2012. After having received her Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg (Germany), she held research and teaching positions at Aarhus University (Denmark), at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, at the University of Konstanz, and at the University of Chicago. Her books include: Politics of Deconstruction. A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Stanford University Press 2014; Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking Through Particulars in Literature, Philosophy, and Law. London/New York (Routledge) 2015, co-edited with Michèle Lowrie; Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (co-authored with Albrecht Koschorke, Thomas Frank u. Ethel Matala), Frankfurt (Fischer) 2007; Metaphern der Gesellschaft. Studien zum soziologischen und politischen Imaginären, München 2004; Mythos und Selbstdarstellung. Zur Poetik der Psychoanalyse, Freiburg (Rombach) 1994.

Susanne Luedemann works at the intersection of modern literature, continental philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis. Her current research project is a critical  edition of Hannah Arendts's unpublished lectures on Immanuel Kant. She is also preparing a monograph on Hannah Arendt and the problem of judgment in modernity.

The Spring 2017 Craig Lecture will be held on Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 4:30pm, in the Comparative Literature Seminar Room, 4052, in the Academic Building. 

Spring 2016 - Professor Martin Schäfer (University of Hamburg)

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Spring 2016 Office Hours: Thursdays, 2:00-3:00pm & by appointment
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Martin Jörg Schäfer is a Professor of Literature and Performance Studies at the Hamburg University German Department where he has taught since 2014. He also received his PhD there in 2001 before holding research and teaching positions at Paderborn University, NYU, Erfurt University, the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and Siegen University. He was awarded his "Habilitation" in German and Comparative Literature at Erfurt University in 2010.

His books include: art works. Ästhetik des Postfordismus (2015, as a part of the research network "Kunst&Arbeit"), Die Gewalt der Musse. Wechselverhältnisse von Arbeit, Nichtarbeit, Ästhetik (2013), Szenischer Materialismus. Dionysische Theatralität zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel (2003), Schmerz zum Mitsein. Zur Relektüre Celans und Heideggers durch Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe und Jean-Luc Nancy (2003). An upcoming study relates the interdependence of education and theatrical practices in the late 18th century to the notion of life-long learning in the 21st: Das Theater der Erziehung. Seine Vorgeschichten in Goethes "pädagogischer Provinz."

The Spring 2016 Craig Lecture will be held Thursday, March 10, 4:30-6:00pm in the Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall.

Spring 2015 - Professor Henry Sussman (Yale University)

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Spring 2015 Office Hours: Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00pm, German House Room 304
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Henry Sussman is a Professor of German at Yale University, where he has taught since 2002. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from The Johns Hopkins University in 1975. Previous positions include: The Johns Hopkins University, University at Buffalo, Cornell University, and the University of Cologne.

His books include: Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition (2014), 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 a founding editor of Feedback with assorted weblog posts on literature, film, and media (co-edited by Jason Groves).

The  pdf Spring 2015 Craig Lecture (561 KB) was rescheduled due to inclement weather for April 27,2015 from 4:30-6:15pm in the Alexander Library Teleconference Room.

 Spring 2014 - Professor Helmut Schneider (University of Bonn)

Helmut J. Schneider is Professor emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn, where he taught since 1993. He received his PhD from that same university in 1975. Previous positions were at the University of Stuttgart (1973/75), the University of Bonn (1975-1982), the University of California, Irvine (1983-1990) and Davis (1990-1993). Guest professorships, among others, at Stanford University, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Ohio State University, Columbus, University of Indiana, Bloomington, Harvard University, University of Washington, Seattle, George Washington University, Saint Louis, and Georgetown University, Washington D.C. – Numerous publications on German and European literature of the 18th/19th /20th centuries, in particular on: the history of the pastoral and the German idyll; landscape and utopia; body paradigms in the classical age; Lessing, Kleist, and Goethe; classical drama and theater. Most recent work includes articles on virtuosity in literature, the idea of Heimat in 19th century literature, Goethe’s concept of the museum, sexuality and literature in works by Philip Roth, and the book Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner (2011).

Spring 2013 - Professor Henry Sussman (Yale University)

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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.

  

Fall 2011 - Professor Barbara Hahn (Vanderbilt University)

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 (University of Bonn)

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 (University of California-Irvine)

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 (University of Toronto)

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. Professor Demetz is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor for our department.

Spring 2007 - Professor Eric Downing (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

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 (Washington University in St. Louis)

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 K. Brown (University of Washington)

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 (The Queen's College, Oxford University)

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 (Yale University)

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 (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

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 McCarthy (Vanderbilt University)

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 Sokel (University of Virginia)

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 (Washington University)

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 (Texas A&M University)

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.