Reflecting the strong interdisciplinary ethos of the University of Chicago, members of the faculty in the Department of Germanic Studies often have joint (or even multiple) appointments in the Humanities, as indicated.

In addition, our affiliated faculty (see below) extends the department's intellectual and disciplinary reach, featuring scholars in Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, History, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology, among others. The department's course offerings reflect the faculty's broad-ranging interests.

Core Faculty and Staff -- Visiting Faculty -- Resource Faculty -- Emeriti Faculty

Core Faculty

Catherine Baumann, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Director of the Language Program in German

Office: Cobb 502
Phone: (773) 702-8023
e-mail: ccbauman@uchicago.edu

Catherine Baumann supervises graduate student lecturers teaching College language courses and is responsible for the first, second, and third year curriculum offered in the College. She is the co-author of the first year textbook Kreise and an ACTFL certified Oral Proficiency Interview tester and trainer in German who regularly conducts workshops on the OPI and other aspects of foreign language pedagogy.

Robert Buch, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies and the College; Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Department of Germanic Studies

Office: Wieboldt 114
Phone: (773) 773-702-8023
e-mail: buch@uchicago.edu

Robert Buch joined the department in Autumn 2003 after completing his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University in 2002. He is currently at work on a project tentatively titled “The Legacy of Laocoon,” a study that examines the intersection of the poetics of the image and the aesthetics of pathos in a number of twentieth-century writers, from Kafka and Bataille through Claude Simon to Peter Weiss. In 2007, he co-edited a special issue of Germanic Review, “Figures and Figurations of the (Un-)Dead.” Forthcoming are articles on Heiner Müller’s “Versuchsreihe” and on “The Resistance to Pathos and the Pathos of Resistance in Peter Weiss”. Courses taught in recent years include "Weimar Subjects"; “The (anti-)Bildungsroman in the 20th century”; “The Magic Mountain”; "Erzähler des 19. Jahrhunderts"; "Deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur"; and “Iconographies of Violence.”

Christiane Frey, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies and the College

Office: Wieboldt 115
Phone: (773) 702-8494
e-mail: chrfrey@uchicago.edu

Christiane Frey joined the Department in 2005. She studied Comparative and German Literatures, French and Italian Philology with minor concentrations in Philosophy and Theology mainly in Bonn, Paris, Perugia and Giessen. She received her M. A. from the University of Paris Sorbonne (Lettres comparées) and her Ph.D. from the University of Bonn (Neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaften). Her teaching and research interests focus on the correlations between aesthetics and anthropology (in the 18th century sense of the word, meaning a conception of man based on medical knowledge) from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, especially around 1800. Other interests are the idea of Kallipädie around 1900; the history of educating and testing intellectual talents (Prüfung der Köpfe) since the Renaissance; and concepts of time from Friedrich Schiller to Victor Hugo. Her current long-term project concerns the function and rhetoric of secularization and the survival of Jewish-Christian dichotomies from Luther to Derrida. Her dissertation was titled Laune: Inkonstanz und Individualität in Ästhetik und Anthropologie um 1800. She is currently revising it for publication. In 2003, she co-edited a book on Darstellbarkeit: Zu einem ästhetisch-philosophischen Problem um 1800 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann). Forthcoming are articles on “Fallgeschichte(n) in Karl Philipp Moritz and Philippe Pinel” and on “Poetological Reflexions in Paul Valéry and Rainer Maria Rilke,” as well as an internet lexicon of works relating to the history of knowledge.

Kimberly Kenny, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Norwegian - Curriculum vitae .pdf

Office: Cobb 501
Phone: (773) 702-8494
e-mail: kkenny@uchicago.edu

Kimberly Kenny teaches beginning and intermediate Norwegian language, as well as Norwegian literature. Trained as a comparatist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she teaches courses which seek to integrate Germanic literatures: "Reconnecting Two Germanic Literatures," which examines connections between Hamsun and Kafka, Mann and Kielland, and Ibsen and Hauptmann; “Comparative Fairy Tale,” which encompasses Norwegian, Danish (H.C. Andersen), and German (Bros. Grimm) fairy tales, and “Scandinavian Women’s Literature.”  In a strictly Norwegian vein, she offers a course on Ibsen, as well as one dealing with the Nazi Occupation of Norway called, “Literature of the Occupation.”

David Levin, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies (a division of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities) and the College

Office: Wieboldt 126
Phone: (773) 702-8532
e-mail: dlevin@uchicago.edu

David J. Levin is Associate Professor in the Deptartment of Germanic Studies, in the Committee on Cinema/Media Studies, and in the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies (a division of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities). From 1992-97, he was Assistant Professor of German and Theater Studies at Columbia University. He has just commenced a three year term as Co-Director of the Master’s Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Professor Levin’s recent work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, drama, and cinema.  In 1994, he edited Opera Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford University Press); his Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal was published by Princeton University Press in 1998. His latest book Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. Professor Levin has also worked extensively as a dramaturg for various opera houses in Germany and the United States and for William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet. He recently accepted an invitation to assume the executive editorship of the Opera Quarterly published by Oxford University Press. Under his stewardship, the journal now focuses on the intersection of performance, theory, and history. Prof. Levin spent the 2005-06 academic year at the Free University of Berlin as Academic Director of the Berlin Consortium for German Studies and as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Theater Studies. During the summer of 2007, Prof. Levin served as a visiting scholar at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, during which time he co-convened an international symposium on the Deutsche Oper Berlin's new production of Alexander von Zemlinsky's Der Traumgörge. In addition, he joined Juliane Vogel and Christopher Wild to team-teach a “Kompakt Seminar” at the University of Konstanz on the Dramaturgy of Violence.

Susanne Luedemann, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, and the College

Susanne Luedemann will be joining the department in January 2009 after five years of teaching at the University of Konstanz and a perennial appointment as a Research Associate at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in German Literature at the University of Freiburg, and held appointments at the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Århus (Danmark) and at the Department of Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her books include Mythos und Selbstdarstellung. Zur Poetik der Psychoanalyse (Freiburg, Rombach Verlag, 1994), Metaphern der Gesellschaft. Studien zum soziologischen und politischen Imaginären (München, Fink-Verlag, 2004) and Der Fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (together with Albrecht Koschorke, Thomas Frank and Ethel Matala de Mazza, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer-Verlag, 2006).
Professor Lüdemann’s areas of specialization include German literature from the 18th to the 20th century (especially 19th- and 20th- century prose and drama), contemporary literary theory and aesthetics. She has also worked extensively on social theory, political theory, and psychoanalytic theory. Her recent work focuses on the Poetics of the Example in Arts and Sciences (18th to 20th century), with a strong emphasis on the history of case studies between law, literature and medicine (psychiatry), and on Literary Realism and the Semiotic Crisis of Modernity.

Eric L. Santner, Ph.D., Chair of the Department, Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, Professor of Germanic Studies, Committee on Jewish Studies, and the College
Curriculum vitae .pdf -- Bibliography .pdf

Office: Wieboldt 204
Phone: (773) 834-0948
e-mail: esantner@uchicago.edu

Eric L. Santner, Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies as of July 1, 2000 was named the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies in September 2003. He joined the Chicago department in autumn 1996 after twelve years of teaching at Princeton University. His books include Friedrich Hölderlin. Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination; Stranded Objects. Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany; My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (winner Honorable Mention, Koret Jewish Book Prize in Philosophy and Religious Thought; Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA; Honorable Mention, Rene Wellek Prize of the ACLA); Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Moishe Postone. Two new books appeared in 2005-06: The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (University of Chicago Press), written with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press). Santner continues to work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and religious thought.

Jan Schwarz, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Yiddish - Curriculum vitae .pdf

Office: Foster Hall 511
Phone: (773) 834-1703
e-mail: schwarzj@uchicago.edu

Jan Schwarz joined the department as Senior Lecturer in Yiddish Studies in 2006 following three years as lecturer in the Committee on Jewish Studies. His books include Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers (Wisconsin UP 2005) and The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Yiddish Literature (in Danish, Rhodos 1993). As a native of Denmark, he earned a Cand. Mag. in Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature at University of Copenhagen, and a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University. Currently, he is working on a book entitled The Survivor Generation: Yiddish Writers Since the 1940s. He is the co-editor of POLIN 20: Studies in Polish Jewry (2007) devoted to the topic “Memorializing the Holocaust” one of several publications in the field of Holocaust Studies. He organized (with Professor Eric Selinger, DePaul University) of the conference Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America at U of C, November 8-9, 2007. The conference featured leading scholars in the fields of Jewish and American literary studies. As an experienced Yiddish teacher, he has published The Yiddish Teacher/Der yiddish lerer (2005) with his wife Rebecca Lillian, a dialogue sequence with CDs for beginners and intermediate students.

David E. Wellbery, Ph.D., LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, Committee on Social Thought, and the College; Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of Germanic Studies - Curriculum vitae .pdf

Office: Wieboldt 404
Phone: (773) 702-2372; (773) 702-8494
e-mail: wellbery@uchicago.edu

David E. Wellbery, who joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2001 as the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor, holds appointments in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature and in the Committee on Social Thought. He is the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture. Professor Wellbery is the author of two studies that are considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s Laocoön. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1984) and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 1996). His edited volume, Positionen der Literaturwissenschaft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists “Erdbeben in Chile” (Beck Verlag, 1984), which is now in its fourth printing, has for two decades served as the principle introduction to literary theory for students of German literature. Professor Wellbery is also the editor-in-chief of the monumental A New History of German Literature, published by Harvard University Press in 2004. Professor Wellbery has been granted fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung. In 2005, he was awarded the Research Prize (Forschungspreis) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of his scholarly achievement. Before coming to the University of Chicago, Professor Wellbery taught at Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Bonn, Princeton University, the University of Copenhagen, and the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Since 1998, he has been co-editor of the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, the most distinguished journal in the field of German literary studies. In 2006, a collection of Professor Wellbery’s essays entitled Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen: Aufsätze zur ästhetischen Wissenschaft appeared in the prestigious Edition Akzente (Carl Hanser Verlag). His current projects include a book on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie as well as a broad-based study of Goethe and philosophy. In 2006-7, Professor Wellbery co-directed, together with Professor James Conant (Philosophy), a Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on the topic of “Non-Discursive Representation from Goethe to Wittgenstein.”

Staff

Michelle Zimet, Departmental Administrator

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