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) 702-8008
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 Graduate 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.”

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 Department of Germanic Studies, the Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies; he is also currently serving as Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH). Before joining the faculty at Chicago in 1998, he taught German and Theater Studies at Columbia University. Professor Levin’s recent work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, drama, and cinema. In 1994, he edited 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 was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. 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 serves as executive editor of the Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press. During the summer of 2008, Prof. Levin once again joined Juliane Vogel and Christopher Wild to team-teach a “Kompakt Seminar” at the University of Konstanz: this summer’s theme will be “Auftreten und Erzählen”. In addition, he team-taught a Kompakt Seminar at the University of Mainz with Clemens Risi (F.U. Berlin) on "Wagner, Performance, and the Body" as part of the International Postgraduate Program in Performance & Media Studies.

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

Office: Classics 308
Phone: (773) 702-8494
e-mail: sluedemann@uchicago.edu

Susanne Luedemann joined 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 - 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.” In 2008, Professor Wellbery was elected a corresponding member of the Bayrische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Christopher J. Wild, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and the College

Office: Wieboldt 117
Phone: (773) 702-8494
e-mail: wild@uchicago.edu

Before joining the Department of Germanic Studies in 2008, Christopher Wild taught at UCLA (2006-08) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1997-2004).  In the intervening years he held a visiting professorship at the University of Konstanz. Professor Wild is the author of  Theater der Keuschheit - Keuschheit des Theaters. Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Rombach: Freiburg, 2003), which traces the profound historical transformation of theatricality that takes place in German theater from the Baroque to Classicism.  Furthermore, he has edited (with Helmut Puff) Zwischen den Disziplinen? Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003) and several thematic issues of Germanic Review (with Eric Downing) and Modern Language Notes (with Rüdiger Campe).  His current projects examine the ways in which theology and religion inform developments that are generally considered genuinely modern.  Most immediately, he is working on a book that asks the seemingly simple question why Descartes’ founding text of modern philosophy was titled Meditations on First Philosophy in order to take its generic affiliation seriously.  A more long-term project concerns a media history of the Reformation and is going to be collaborative - together with Helmut Puff (University of Michigan) and Ulrike Strasser (UC Irvine). In the academic year 2009-2010 Professor Wild will serve as the Williams Andrew Clark Professor at the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies of UCLA and co-organize (with Ulrike Strasser) a series of four conferences on “Cultures of Communication, Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond.”  In cooperation with Juliane Vogel (University of Konstanz) and David Levin he has just launched a multi-year research project within the Konstanz’s Excellenzcluster Cultural Foundations of Integration which seeks to develop a “Kulturelle Poetologie des Auftretens” by revisiting theater and theatricality from their constitutive operations of entry and exit.

Staff

Michelle Zimet, Departmental Administrator

Office: Classics 25F
Phone: (773) 702-8494
e-mail: mzimet@uchicago.edu

Michelle Zimet has been the Department Coordinator of the Germanic Studies program since 2004. Michelle is responsible for the day-to-day operation and well-being of the Department, as well as the planning of long-term events and conferences. Prior to joining the Department, Michelle taught at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. She was previously a partner in an environmental law firm in Chicago, taught land use law as an adjunct professor at Northwestern Law School, and worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the American Planning Association. Michelle holds a law degree from UCLA, a master’s degree in Urban Planning from UCLA, and a master’s in teaching degree from National Louis University.

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