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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 uldenburgs, 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. |
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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 Fassbinder and performance. 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. |
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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. |
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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 will
be published by Fordham University Press in 2008, under the working title of The Opinion System: Opinion and Representation from Hobbes to Habermas;
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
forthcoming publications include an essay (to be published in Diacritics) on
the idea of the norm in Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, and a piece (for MLN)
on the role of humor in Hölderlin's novel Hyperion. Prof. Wetters is on
sabbatical for the 2007-2008 academic year, working on a project on "the
demonic" (as Goethe called it), which is read as a figure of failed
secularization in 20th Century authors including Lukács, Benjamin and Heimito
von Doderer. 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." At least
one of these courses will return in the 2008-2009 academic year, along with a
new course, under the working title of "Representing Representation:
Self-referntiality in Art and Literature". |
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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. |
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Aleida Assmann studied English Literature and Egyptology at the
universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen. Between 1968-1974 she has, together with her husband, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, frequently visited upper Egypt
for archaeological excavations. She obtained her Ph.D. and habilitation both in Heidelberg (1977/1992). She taught English Literature at the universities of
Heidelberg and Mannheim from 1972-1980. In 1993, she was appointed to the chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. Topics
of her books include the theory of fiction in an historical perspective (16th - 18th century) (1980), and the career of the concept of "Bildung" in the 19th
and 20th century (1993), theories of literary writing and reading (1996), and concepts of time and tradition (1999). Together with her husband Jan Assmann she
has organized and led an interdisciplinary research group over 20 years that has produced ten publications on central topics in a wider cultural perspective
such as orality and literacy (1983), canonization and censorship (1987), wisdom (1991), mystery (1997), solitude (2000) and attention (2001). A main and
ongoing focus of her research is the study of memory as an individual, collective and cultural phenomenon, including the question of literary representations
of trauma and taboo. This interest took shape in two books (Spaces of Memory, 1999 and Repression of History, Obsession with History, 1999).
She has taught at the universities of Rice, Texas and Princeton and has been the recipient of fellowships (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, 1992/93,
and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 1998/99) and of the Philip Morris Price for studies in the Humanities (1999). |
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Winfried Menninghaus has taught as Professor at the Peter
Szondi-Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (Freie Universität Berlin) since 1985; and has served as chair there 1991-1994
and 1996-1999. He has held visiting professorships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1987/88, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1992, and at Yale,
1994-present. He has been a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (since 2002), a member of the board of the Zentrum für
Literaturforschung, and co-editor of the journal Poetica. His fields of research include classical rhetoric and poetics, aesthetics and anthropology,
and literature and poetics since 1750, with a focus on German Romanticism and 20th century critical theory. His books include Walter Benjamins Theorie der
Sprachmagie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980, Paul Celan - Magie der Form. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980, Artistische Schrift. Studien zur
Kompositionskunst Gottfried Kellers. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1982, Schwellenkunde. Walter Benjamins Passage des Mythos.Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986, Unendliche Verdopplung. Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1987, Mugen no nijuka. Tokyo: Hosei University Press,1992, Ekel. Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1999, In Praise of Nonsense. Kant and Bluebeard. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, Shikiigaku, Tokyo: Gendai Shichosha, 2000,
Disgust. Theory and History of a Strong Passion. SUNY Press, 2003, Das Versprechen der Schönheit, Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp) 2003,
Hälfte des Lebens. Versuch über Hölderlins Poetik, Frankfurt am Main (Surhkamp) 2005. |
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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 distortion with a fascination for (conceptual, social, and fictional) systems, a gravitation toward generative theoretical paradigms (among
them, deconstruction, rhetorical reading, and rhizomatic schizoanalysis), and an attentiveness to the aftershocks of modernity upon the subjects of culture and
psychoanalysis. His literary preferences have run to Kleist, Kafka, Musil, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, 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 books include The Aesthetic Contract (Stanford
University Press, 1997); Afterimages of Modernity (Johns Hopkins, 1990); The Hegelian Aftermath (Johns Hopkins, 1981); High Resolution:
Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy (Oxford UP, 1989); Kafka’s Unholy Trinity (Twayne’s, 1993); Psyche and Text
(SUNY, 1993); and Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor (Coda, 1978). His current project, The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion
, is forthcoming in 2005 from Fordham University Press. He has been the recipient of Rockefeller Humanities, NEH, Fulbright, and Camargo Foundation
Fellowships. |
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