Yale University | Department of German

Rainer Nägele joined the Yale faculty in January of 2006. He has taught and written on German literature from the Baroque to the twentieth century and has written as well on French and classical Greek literature. His many books include: Heinrich Böll - Einführung in das Werk und die Forschung; Peter Handke; Literatur und Utopie - Versuche zu Hölderlin; Text, Geschichte und Subjektivität in Hölderlins Dichtung: Uneßbarer Schrift gleich; Reading after Freud. Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud; Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity; Echoes of Translation - Reading Between Texts; Lesarten der Moderne - Essays; Literarische Vexierbilder - Drei Versuche zu einer Figur; Echos: Übersetzen. Lesen zwischen Texten; Hölderlins Kritik der poetischen Vernunft.

Paul North received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University in 2007. In his teaching and writing he addresses diverse points in Western intellectual history, from fifth-century Athens to twentieth-century Prague. His first book, entitled “The Problem of Distraction: Our Unintentional Ground,” now in manuscript, critiques this history for its emphasis on mind, bringing to light the tradition’s intellectualism through an obscure counter-point: not thinking. Through readings of texts by Parmenides, La Bruyère, and Heidegger, among others, the book shows why the ‘unthinking thing’ has been so resistant to theorization. He has published articles and reviews on Johann Nestroy, Franz Kafka, and Hannah Arendt, among others, and is currently co-editing a volume on messianic thought in critical theory. His present project is a book-length study of Kafka’s theological-philosophical treatise, known as the Zürau Aphorisms. In his courses he teaches texts in the history of aesthetics, twentieth-century critical theory, phenomenology, and post-enlightenment German literature, with a focus on German-Jewish culture and history.

Henry Sussman received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. Since publishing his first article on proto-surrealist writer Lautréamont in 1975, he has combined his ongoing interest in literary marginality and transformation with a fascination for (conceptual, social, and fictional) systems, a gravitation toward generative theoretical paradigms (among them, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, rhetorical reading), and an attentiveness to the aftershocks of modernity upon the subjects of culture and psychoanalysis. Current courses and seminars revolve around a nexus of interests including contemporary systems theory, Walter Benjamin and the rise of urban cosmopolitan culture, childhood and memory, comparative global life-systems, and the interactions between visual and discursive thinking. His literary preferences have run to Kleist, Kafka, Musil, Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Cortázar, Bolaño, Poe, Melville, and Conrad; his preeminent critical models include Freud, Marx, Benjamin, Barthes, Blanchot, Bataille, de Man, and Miller; and, among the philosophers who have most influenced him are Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Adorno, Deleuze, and Nancy. Psychoanalysis, religion and religious studies, and cinema have all cast their aura over him as interstices between theoretical paradigms and sociological communities. His forthcoming book, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010) explores current and systematic prospects for the book medium. Other book-length studies include include The Aesthetic Contract, The Task of the Critic, Afterimages of Modernity , The Hegelian Aftermath, High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy, Kafka’s Unholy Trinity, Idylls of the Outsider, Psyche and Text, and Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor. He has been the recipient of Rockefeller Humanities, NEH, Fulbright, and Camargo Foundation Fellowships. He currently serves as co-director of IC3, the Institute on Critical Climate Change, a workgroup at the interstice between contemporary global catastrophes and the Prevailing Operating Systems of theoretical deliberation.

William Whobrey (Ph.D., Stanford University) is currently serving as the director of Yale Summer Programs and an assistant dean of Yale College. He has studied at the University of Washington, Seattle (BA and MA), and the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg. He has taught German language and literature courses and continues to do so, with a focus on medieval literature, especially Old Norse and Old English, and the history of Germanic languages. He maintains an interest in teaching advanced German language through courses in current affairs and political rhetoric. His research interests are presently centered on the medieval library of the Carthusian monastery of Buxheim. These efforts have resulted in an ongoing project of cataloging this library on the internet. Recent publications have also focused on this particular topic, and future work will include the publication of specific manuscripts currently held by the Beinecke Rare Books Library. Along with this particular project, the use of technology in language teaching has also been a major preoccupation, and one project for advanced listening skills can be viewed at http://www.yale.edu/dwelle.

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). Jeffrey Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. His most recent paper in this area is “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory, 22. He is the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (with Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, and Sztompka, 2004), and The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (2005), which he has edited with Philip Smith. With Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, he is the editor of Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (2006). In the field of politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (2006), which includes discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social movements and incorporation.

Karsten Harries, the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy works about the Philosophy of Art and Architecture, Phenomenology, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Renaissance Philosophy. Harries has published and lectured widely on Heidegger, early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of art and architecture. Among his published books are The Meaning of Modern Art, The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism, The Broken Frame: Three Lectures, The Ethical Function of Architecture (winner of the American Institute of Architects 8th Annual International Architecture Book Award for Criticism), Infinity of Perspective, with Christoph Jamme, he has edited Martin Heidegger: Kunst, Politik, Technik, which appeared in an English version as Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology.

Paula Hyman, who received her PhD from Columbia University in 1975, is the author of The Jewish Woman In America (1976); From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906-1939 (1979); The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace (1991); Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (1995); and The Jews of Modern France (1998).
She offers courses on topics in modern European and American Jewish history, with a special emphasis on the history of women and gender.

Patrick McCreless (Professor of Music Theory, Department of Music) received his Ph. D. degree from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. Before coming to Yale in 1998, he taught at the Eastman School and at The University of Texas at Austin. Much of his work has focused on Wagner. His book Wagner’s Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Music, is one of only two monographs in English on a single opera of the Ring. He has also published essays on Götterdämmerung and Parsifal, and in recent years he has lectured on the Ring at the Metropolitan Opera. Since coming to Yale he has offered undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on the Ring, Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal. Other publications of his involving German music and culture include essays on Schubert (the Violin Fantasy) and Schumann (the Liederkreis, Op. 39), rhetoric and music in German music theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the works of the early twentieth-century music theorists Ernst Kurth and Alfred Lorenz.

Steven Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and Master of Branford College received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has served as the Director of Graduate Studies, Director of the Undergraduate Program in Humanities, and Acting Chair of Judaic Studies. His research has focused on the history of political philosophy, the role of statecraft in constitutional government, and Jewish thought.
His recent publications include Spinoza, Liberalism, and Jewish Identity (1997), Spinoza's Book of Life (2003), and Reading Leo Strauss (2006), and The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (2009).

Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has published widely on German and European fiction, cinema, and visual culture. She is currently finishing a book on cinema culture in Germany from 1930 to the present, focussing particularly on the Third Reich, the Cold War, the East and West German New Waves, and on reunification. From 1990-2002, she was professor (and from 1995-7 chair) of German at University of Chicago. At Yale she has taught or co-taught courses on postwar East and West German cinema; Germany and Eastern Europe; WWII homefront literature; German and Soviet modernism; leftist culture in 20th-century Germany; dissident culture in Communist Eastern Europe; the eighteenth-century European novel; European literary regionalism; the history of the picture book. She serves on the Editorial Board of New Geman Critique as on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture. She has held Humboldt, Mellon, ACLS and DAAD fellowships, and has been a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, as at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Jay M. Winter, the Charles J. Stille Professor of History, is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. His other interests include remembrance of war in the 20th century, such as memorial and mourning sites, European population decline, the causes and institutions of war, British popular culture in the era of the Great War and the Armenian genocide of 1915. His courses include lectures on Europe in the age of total war, and on modern British history, as well as seminars on history and memory and European identities. He is the author or co-author of a dozen books, including Socialism and the Challenge of War, Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18, The Great War and the British People, The Fear of Population Decline, The Experience of World War I, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, 1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, Remembering War: The Great War between History and Memory in the 20th Century, and Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century.

Yale University > Department of German > Faculty



		Faculty


				Rüdiger Campe received his PhD from the University of Freiburg in 1986. Before joining the department at Yale he taught at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a visiting professor at the European University at Frankfurt/Oder, New York University, and the University of Konstanz. His books include Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit. Literatur und Berechnung zwischen Pascal und Kleist, published in 2002, and Affekt und Ausdruck. Umwandlungen der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, 1996. His focus in teaching and writing is on rhetoric and aesthetics, history of science and representation, (baroque) theater, and the European novel (from the 18th century). His current projects comprise a study on procedures of evidence in the Enlightenment; institution and the novel in the 20th century; and a theory of advocacy in law, literature and politics. In 2002, he received the Aby-Warburg-Award for the Humanities, and during the 2007 – 2008 academic year he will be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Berlin.















				Marion Gehlker received her MA in English, Russian and Pedagogy, as well as a DaF Certificate (Teaching German as a Foreign Language) from the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany, and her PhD in German Literature from New York University. She came to Yale in 2001 after having taught German language and culture classes for over ten years at Hunter College, NYU, Barnard College and Columbia University. As the Language Program Director, she is in charge of coordinating and teaching language classes and training graduate student Teaching Fellows and instructors. In spring 2007, she was awarded a contract with Yale University Press to develop three didacticized novels for intermediate / advanced German. She is also working on a collection of short short stories for beginning German as well as a content-based textbook for intermediate German, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of language and culture. She has presented papers and published articles on film, music, poetry and novels in the language classroom.










				Cyrus Hamlin (emeritus) studied at Harvard (BA 1958) and at Yale (PhD in Comparative Literature, 1963). He is Professor of German and Comparative Literature and has served as Chairman of both Departments. In addition, he has been Visiting Professor at Boston University, the University of California at San Diego, Oxford University, Harvard University and the Free University in Berlin. His teaching focuses on the Age of Goethe and the era of European Romanticism. He also teaches courses on theater and opera, with particular emphasis on Richard Wagner and Bertolt Brecht. Aspects of the Classical and Biblical traditions and the theory and practice of Hermeneutics are also considered. His initial publications focused on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, on Goethe's Faust and on the poetics of European Romanticism. He is the general editor of the Suhrkamp edition of Goethe in English in 12 volumes and the editor with commentary of the Norton Critical Edition of Goethe's Faust. His essays on the poetics of Romanticism are collected in a volume entitled Hermeneutics of Form (1998). He has also co-edited a collection of essays on Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture, shortly to appear with the Yale University Press. His current project concerns the founding of the Institutions of Culture in Berlin during the Romantic Period from 1810 to 1830: University, Theater and Museum.



				Carol Jacobs, chair of the Department of German and Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature, received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in Comparative Literature. Before teaching at Yale she taught as professor of Comparative Literature and English at SUNY Buffalo, and as professor of German at Johns Hopkins and NYU. She teaches literary, philosophical and theoretical texts that range from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. She has written on Lessing, Kleist, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Rilke, Sophocles, and the English Romantics, among others. Her early books (The Dissimulating Harmony, Uncontainable Romanticism) explore theories of authorship and authority, both literary and political, and their relation to issues of language, truth and knowledge. More recently she has written on representation and time in relation to narrative (Telling Time), and on the writings of Walter Benjamin (In the Language of Walter Benjamin). Her current project (Skirting the Ethical, Stanford University Press, 2008) is a meditation on the relationship between language and ethics that considers texts from classical Greek to contemporary cinema (Sophocles, Plato, Hamann, Sebald, Campion). She has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the ACLS and other awards.


				Rainer Nägele joined the Yale faculty in January of 2006. He has taught and written on German literature from the Baroque to the twentieth century and has written as well on French and classical Greek literature. His many books include: Heinrich Böll - Einführung in das Werk und die Forschung; Peter Handke; Literatur und Utopie - Versuche zu Hölderlin; Text, Geschichte und Subjektivität in Hölderlins Dichtung: Uneßbarer Schrift gleich; Reading after Freud. Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud; Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity; Echoes of Translation - Reading Between Texts; Lesarten der Moderne - Essays; Literarische Vexierbilder - Drei Versuche zu einer Figur; Echos: Übersetzen. Lesen zwischen Texten; Hölderlins Kritik der poetischen Vernunft.


				Anthony J. Niesz (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin/Madison, 1977). Early interests included German drama (book: Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to Goethe, 1980), Austrian literature, GDR literature, and the first academic paper on Interactive Fiction (Critical Inquiry (1984). In 1976-77 he became involved in the microcomputer revolution, building his own computer system, and (1978) designing and building a hardware interface board and writing assembly language software to send and receive Morse code via ham radio. He soon became particularly committed to applying computer technology to support language teaching and learning. Software projects such as his Yale Video Subtitler (1987) and Quick and Dirty Video Subtitler (1991 for Macintosh systems) enabled teachers to put German subtitles onto German films, thus aiding the development of listening comprehension. (More than a dozen films were subtitled in their target languages in the course of ten years.) Typical software projects of the 1990's included the first interactive digital German dialect map (1996) and an interactive annotated digital German reader (1997), based on Thomas Mann's "Gefallen." The turn of the millennium saw the inception of Project IVY: Interactive Video at Yale, the first practical networked digital interactive video on demand software for academic environments, and a series of more than half a dozen NDIV projects such as the Guldenburgs, being used at Yale as well as at other institutions. These NDIV projects are based on his IVYmaker software to generate NDIV HTML control files automatically.


				Paul North received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University in 2007. In his teaching and writing he addresses diverse points in Western intellectual history, from fifth-century Athens to twentieth-century Prague. His first book, entitled “The Problem of Distraction: Our Unintentional Ground,” now in manuscript, critiques this history for its emphasis on mind, bringing to light the tradition’s intellectualism through an obscure counter-point: not thinking. Through readings of texts by Parmenides, La Bruyère, and Heidegger, among others, the book shows why the ‘unthinking thing’ has been so resistant to theorization. He has published articles and reviews on Johann Nestroy, Franz Kafka, and Hannah Arendt, among others, and is currently co-editing a volume on messianic thought in critical theory. His present project is a book-length study of Kafka’s theological-philosophical treatise, known as the Zürau Aphorisms. In his courses he teaches texts in the history of aesthetics, twentieth-century critical theory, phenomenology, and post-enlightenment German literature, with a focus on German-Jewish culture and history.


				Brigitte Peucker, the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and a Professor of Film Studies, received her PhD from Yale University, where she studied German and English Literatures. She has published books on pre-Romantic tropes in 18th-century literature (Bouvier, 1980); a book on poetry, Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (Yale, 1987); one on film, Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton, 1995), which was translated into German and appeared with Verlag Vorwerk 8 in Berlin (1999); and a second book on film, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, 2007). She is currently working on a book titled Fassbinder's Performance; concurrently, she is editing Blackwell's Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder in their Cinema Directors series. She writes and teaches in the areas of German cinema (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders; Weimar and Nazi Cinema), of film and the other arts, on the theory and history of spectatorship, on Alfred Hitchcock; and on affect in the horror film. In the German Department, her teaching includes courses on theories of visuality and on literature and the visual arts, 18th-20th centuries. She is a recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Morse, and Mellon Fellowships. She served as Chair of the Film Studies Program at Yale from 1986-2000, and as Chair of the German Department, 1997-2002 and 2003-4.


				Jeffrey L. Sammons, is the Leavenworth Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages and Literatures, B.A., Yale, 1958; Ph.D., Yale, 1962. After a three-year appointment at Brown University, he returned to Yale in 1964, continuing to serve on the faculty until retirement at the end of 2001. Chairman, Department of German, 1969-77, 1988-91; Director, Yale Summer Language Institute, 1980-84. Topics of his research include Heine, Young Germany and the Vormärz, literary sociology, nineteenth-century realists, especially Raabe and Spielhagen, and German fiction about America. Most recent book publications: Friedrich Spielhagen: Novelist of Germany’s False Dawn (2004), Heinrich Heine: Alternative Perspectives 1985-2005 (2006), and Kuno Francke’s Edition of The German Classics (1913-15): A Critical and Historical Overview (2009), as well as a translation with commentary: Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: A Memorial (2006). Editor, North American Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (43 vols.). Among his honors: Guggenheim Fellowship; American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and travel grant; member, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences; Humphrey Fellowship, Ben-Gurion University, Israel; Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor of German, Rutgers University.


				Howard Stern received his AB from Harvard (German) 1968 and his PhD from Yale (Comparative Literature) 1978. His publications have been on Mörike, Rilke, Morgenstern, Benjamin, Celan, Concrete Poetry, music theory, Russian and Yiddish literature; original poetry and translations of German poetry from Goethe and Schiller to Morgenstern. His teaching interests include German Language, Poetry in Performance, Theory and Practice of Literary Translation, Formalism, Yiddish Language and Literature, European Literature from Homer to Dante, Music. His special projects are on wine tasting, recitation and performance, and low-technology teaching.


				Henry Sussman received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. Since publishing his first article on proto-surrealist writer Lautréamont in 1975, he has combined his ongoing interest in literary marginality and transformation with a fascination for (conceptual, social, and fictional) systems, a gravitation toward generative theoretical paradigms (among them, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, rhetorical reading), and an attentiveness to the aftershocks of modernity upon the subjects of culture and psychoanalysis. Current courses and seminars revolve around a nexus of interests including contemporary systems theory, Walter Benjamin and the rise of urban cosmopolitan culture, childhood and memory, comparative global life-systems, and the interactions between visual and discursive thinking. His literary preferences have run to Kleist, Kafka, Musil, Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Cortázar, Bolaño, Poe, Melville, and Conrad; his preeminent critical models include Freud, Marx, Benjamin, Barthes, Blanchot, Bataille, de Man, and Miller; and, among the philosophers who have most influenced him are Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Adorno, Deleuze, and Nancy. Psychoanalysis, religion and religious studies, and cinema have all cast their aura over him as interstices between theoretical paradigms and sociological communities. His forthcoming book, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010) explores current and systematic prospects for the book medium. Other book-length studies include include The Aesthetic Contract, The Task of the Critic, Afterimages of Modernity , The Hegelian Aftermath, High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy, Kafka’s Unholy Trinity, Idylls of the Outsider, Psyche and Text, and Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor. He has been the recipient of Rockefeller Humanities, NEH, Fulbright, and Camargo Foundation Fellowships. He currently serves as co-director of IC3, the Institute on Critical Climate Change, a workgroup at the interstice between contemporary global catastrophes and the Prevailing Operating Systems of theoretical deliberation.


				Kirk Wetters received his PhD from New York University in 2004. His work focuses on philosophical, political and literary problems, examined through their historical manifestations and representations. Prof. Wetters' first book, The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas, was published with Fordham University Press in 2008; this work explores the modern conceptualization of opinion and public opinion against the background of older conceptions and metaphors, with particular attention to the development of a literary public sphere. Additional publications include an essay, published in Diacritics, on the contrasting ideas of the norm and the normal in Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, as well as an essay on the role of humor in Hölderlin's Hyperion. Prof. Wetters current project centers around "the demonic" (as Goethe called it), a term which, over a long tradition, has ciphered the troubled relation between individual and society - self and identity, morphology and history - in the modern world. In addition to Goethe, Lukács' Theory of the Novel, Walter Benjamin's Elective Affinities (on Goethe's novel of the same title), Heimito von Doderer's Die Dämonen and Hans Blumenberg's Arbeit am Mythos will play a central role. Courses taught at Yale include: "Literature, Politics and the Public Sphere," "Sovereignty: Power and Representation," "The Literature of Travel and Tourism," "Orpheus and the Operatic Tradition", "German Short Prose from Lichtenberg to Bernhard," and "Goethe's Concept of the Demonic," "Representing Representation: Self-referentiality in Art and Literature". New courses for 2009-10 will be "Austrian Novels after Musil" (Doderer, Bachmann, Bernhard and others) and "Confidence Games" (on literary representations of con-artists, fakers and forgers).


				William Whobrey (Ph.D., Stanford University) is currently serving as the director of Yale Summer Programs and an assistant dean of Yale College. He has studied at the University of Washington, Seattle (BA and MA), and the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg. He has taught German language and literature courses and continues to do so, with a focus on medieval literature, especially Old Norse and Old English, and the history of Germanic languages. He maintains an interest in teaching advanced German language through courses in current affairs and political rhetoric. His research interests are presently centered on the medieval library of the Carthusian monastery of Buxheim. These efforts have resulted in an ongoing project of cataloging this library on the internet. Recent publications have also focused on this particular topic, and future work will include the publication of specific manuscripts currently held by the Beinecke Rare Books Library. Along with this particular project, the use of technology in language teaching has also been a major preoccupation, and one project for advanced listening skills can be viewed at http://www.yale.edu/dwelle.


	Affiliated Faculty
			Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). Jeffrey Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. His most recent paper in this area is “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory, 22. He is the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (with Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, and Sztompka, 2004), and The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (2005), which he has edited with Philip Smith. With Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, he is the editor of Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (2006). In the field of politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (2006), which includes discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social movements and incorporation.


			Seyla Benhabib (Political Science and Philosophy) ...more to follow

			Karsten Harries, the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy works about the Philosophy of Art and Architecture, Phenomenology, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Renaissance Philosophy. Harries has published and lectured widely on Heidegger, early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of art and architecture. Among his published books are The Meaning of Modern Art, The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism, The Broken Frame: Three Lectures, The Ethical Function of Architecture (winner of the American Institute of Architects 8th Annual International Architecture Book Award for Criticism), Infinity of Perspective, with Christoph Jamme, he has edited Martin Heidegger: Kunst, Politik, Technik, which appeared in an English version as Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology.


			Paula Hyman, who received her PhD from Columbia University in 1975, is the author of The Jewish Woman In America (1976); From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906-1939 (1979); The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace (1991); Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (1995); and The Jews of Modern France (1998). She offers courses on topics in modern European and American Jewish history, with a special emphasis on the history of women and gender.

			Patrick McCreless (Professor of Music Theory, Department of Music) received his Ph. D. degree from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. Before coming to Yale in 1998, he taught at the Eastman School and at The University of Texas at Austin. Much of his work has focused on Wagner. His book Wagner’s Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Music, is one of only two monographs in English on a single opera of the Ring. He has also published essays on Götterdämmerung and Parsifal, and in recent years he has lectured on the Ring at the Metropolitan Opera. Since coming to Yale he has offered undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on the Ring, Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal. Other publications of his involving German music and culture include essays on Schubert (the Violin Fantasy) and Schumann (the Liederkreis, Op. 39), rhetoric and music in German music theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the works of the early twentieth-century music theorists Ernst Kurth and Alfred Lorenz.

			Steven Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and Master of Branford College received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has served as the Director of Graduate Studies, Director of the Undergraduate Program in Humanities, and Acting Chair of Judaic Studies. His research has focused on the history of political philosophy, the role of statecraft in constitutional government, and Jewish thought. His recent publications include Spinoza, Liberalism, and Jewish Identity (1997), Spinoza's Book of Life (2003), and Reading Leo Strauss (2006), and The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (2009).

			Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has published widely on German and European fiction, cinema, and visual culture. She is currently finishing a book on cinema culture in Germany from 1930 to the present, focussing particularly on the Third Reich, the Cold War, the East and West German New Waves, and on reunification. From 1990-2002, she was professor (and from 1995-7 chair) of German at University of Chicago. At Yale she has taught or co-taught courses on postwar East and West German cinema; Germany and Eastern Europe; WWII homefront literature; German and Soviet modernism; leftist culture in 20th-century Germany; dissident culture in Communist Eastern Europe; the eighteenth-century European novel; European literary regionalism; the history of the picture book. She serves on the Editorial Board of New Geman Critique as on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture. She has held Humboldt, Mellon, ACLS and DAAD fellowships, and has been a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, as at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.


			Jay M. Winter, the Charles J. Stille Professor of History, is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. His other interests include remembrance of war in the 20th century, such as memorial and mourning sites, European population decline, the causes and institutions of war, British popular culture in the era of the Great War and the Armenian genocide of 1915. His courses include lectures on Europe in the age of total war, and on modern British history, as well as seminars on history and memory and European identities. He is the author or co-author of a dozen books, including Socialism and the Challenge of War, Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18, The Great War and the British People, The Fear of Population Decline, The Experience of World War I, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, 1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, Remembering War: The Great War between History and Memory in the 20th Century, and Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century.


			Christopher Wood (History of Art) has been teaching at Yale since 1992. He has received Harvard's Jacob Wendell Scholarship and Sheldon Fellowship, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship, and a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship from Yale. Professor Wood has been a guest scholar at the Institut für Europäische Kunstgeschichte in Augsburg (1994), and a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2002 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEH Rome Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome. In fall 2004 he was Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. From 1999 to 2002 he was Book Review Editor of the Art Bulletin. Christopher Wood's website
	Visiting Scholars and Post-docs PD Dr. Jürgen Brokoff, University of Bonn, Germany (October 2009 to March 2010) www.uni-bonn.de/~brokoff Dr. Daniel Cuonz, University of Zurich, Switzerland (March 2008 - March 2010) Dr. Julia Weber, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany (Fall 2008 - Fall 2010)