Faculty
Professor German Language and Literature
Chair of the Department
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). Further projects comprise a study on Lichtenberg and evidence in the Enlightenment; institution and the novel in the 20th century; and a theory of advocacy and representation in law, literature and politics. In 2002, he received the Aby-Warburg-Award; 2008 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg.
Senior Lector in German
German Language Program Director
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.
Carol Jacobs
Professor German Language and Literature
Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature
Carol Jacobs 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.
Chrissy Hosea
Lector in Dutch
Chrissy Hosea received her MA in Applied Linguistics as well as the Certificate of Didactic Competence for Vocational and Adult Education from the Free University in Amsterdam. Before coming to Yale, she taught Dutch at the Institute for Dutch as a Second Language of the University of Amsterdam and was in charge of the Program of Netherlandic Language and Cultural Studies at Cornell University. She is responsible for the Dutch Studies Program at Yale and teaches Dutch language at various levels as well as Dutch culture courses. Her research interests include Second Language Acquisition and Language Pedagogy and in particular listening comprehension and perception and language testing. She is currently setting up a Dutch distance learning course which will allow students from Yale University and Cornell University to participate in the same interactive language classroom.
Ansgar Mohnkern
Lector
of German
Ansgar Mohnkern
received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011. Before studying at Yale, he received his M.A. in German and Philosophy from the University of Bonn. His research interests are centered around German literature and philosophy from the 18 th century to the present, with a particular emphasis on questions concerning knowledge/ Erkenntnis. His book Metapher, Wiederholung, Form: Zu Goethes Unbegrifflichkeiten (Aisthesis: Bielefeld, forthcoming 2011) offers a critical investigation of the borders of conceptional knowledge, language, and representation in relation to Goethe's both scientific and literary writings. His current project explores strategies of narratological legitimation in the 19 th (Stifter, Keller, Fontane) and 20 th century novel (Kafka, T. Mann), and strives to understand the systemic relationship of the form of the novel to legal strategies of founding constitutional legitimacy. As a PhD student at Yale, he taught many courses on German language and literature and was awarded the Prize Teaching Fellowship for excellence in teaching.
Rainer Nägele
Alfred C & Martha F Mohr Professor German Language and Literature
Director of Graduate Students
Professor Classics
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.
Assistant Professor German Language and Literature
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 (Forthcoming 2011, Stanford University Press), 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
Elias Leavenworth Professor of German Language and Literature
Professor Film Studies
Director of Graduate Students Film Studies
Brigitte Peucker 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 appeard in the
Cultural Memory in the Present series at Stanford University Press
(2007). She is the editor of Blackwell's Companion to Rainer Werner
Fassbinder in their Cinema Directors series, and she is working on a
book titled Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. 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
Leavenworth Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature
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.
Senior Lector in German
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.
Poetry by Howard Stern: nihil obstat
Henry Sussman
Visiting Prof German Language and Literature
Henry Sussman received his Ph.D. from 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
Associate Prof German Language and Literature
Director of Undergraduate Students
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. Articles on Oswald Spengler, Heimito von Doderer and Hans Blumenberg will be forthcoming in 2011. Prof. Wetters current project centers around "the demonic" (as Goethe called it), a term which has helped to configure the troubled relation between individual and society - self and identity, morphology and history - in the modern world. In addition to Goethe, this work--tentatively titled Demonic History--will cover Lukács' Theory of the Novel, Walter Benjamin's Elective Affinities (on Goethe's novel of the same title), Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and Heimito von Doderer's Die Dämonen. During the 2010-11 academic year, Prof. Wetters will be completing this book at the University of Bonn with the support of a Humboldt Fellowship. 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," "Austrian Novels after Musil" and "Confidence Games: Fakes, Frauds and Counterfeits".
Associate Dean Yale College
Dean of Summer Sessions and Special Programs
William Whobrey (Ph.D., Stanford University) 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
...more to follow
She offers courses on topics in modern European and American Jewish history, with a special emphasis on the history of women and gender.
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).
He received his first degree in economics from King’s College Cambridge. Between 1989 and 1991 he studied at the Free University Berlin and took his PhD in economic history from the London School of Economics in 1996. For 13 years he taught in the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge, before joining Yale as Professor of Modern German History in the summer of 2009.
His books include:
Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (CUP, 2001) which was awarded the H-Soz-Kult Prize for Modern History and the Leverhulme prize. Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Penguin in 2006). It won both the Longman and Wolfson prizes, was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and H Soz Kult prizes. Tooze's current project is a history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany's fateful decision to provoke America's declaration of war in 1917. World fit for Heroes is due to appear with Penguin in 2012.
