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 resource faculty 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 -- Postdoctoral Fellows -- 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.

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.”

Florian Klinger, Ph.D., Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies, and the College

Office: tba
Phone: tba
e-mail: klinger@fas.harvard.edu

Florian Klinger will join the Department of Germanic Studies in autumn 2012. He graduated from the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, then received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2010, and is currently a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Florian has had a previous career as a professional musician and holds an Artist Diploma, Violin, from Hochschule für Musik und Theater München. His book Urteilen, an inquiry into the structure of human judgment in modernity, was published by diaphanes Verlag, Berlin in 2011. He also co-edited a volume of essays on the topic of latency, entitled Latenz: Blinde Passagiere in den Geisteswissenschaften (with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, at Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2011). His work won the Bradley Rubidge Memorial Dissertation Award in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, and a 2009-2010 Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowhip from the Stanford Humanities Center. Florian’s current work involves a broad engagement with pragmatism, in its American as well as European varieties; an investigation of the juncture of the notions of life and activity from ancient rhetoric to 20th century philosophy; a book project on modernist poetics of force.

David Levin, Ph.D., Professor of Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and the College - Curriculum vitae.pdf

Office: Wieboldt 122
Phone: (773) 702-8532
e-mail: dlevin@uchicago.edu

David J. Levin is Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies. In June, 2011 he was appointed the inaugural Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, a new collaborative center for artists and scholars. From 2007-10, he was 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. He has been a guest professor of Theater and Performance Studies at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Mainz; he regularly team-teaches courses on opera, theater, and performance at the University of Konstanz with Professor Christopher Wild (Chicago) and Professor Juliane Vogel (Konstanz). Professor Levin's recent work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, theater, and cinema. He is the editor of Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford University Press, 1994) and the author of Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton University Press, 1998). His latest book Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007; a paperback edition appeared in autumn 2010. 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. This year, David is serving as a faculty sponsor of the graduate workshop in Theater and Performance Studies along with Christopher Wild and John Muse.  In the Spring of 2010, Levin and Christopher Wild hosted "Praxes of Theory", an international conference at Chicago that brought together artists and scholars form Berlin and Chicago to explore the intersections of performance practice and performance theory. The conference inaugurated a multi-year cooperation with the Institute for Theater Studies at the Free University Berlin.

Susanne Lüdemann, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, and the College; Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of Germanic Studies

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

Susanne Lüdemann 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. She also trained as an independent psychoanalyst in 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 research 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. She is currently writing a book on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.

Eric L. Santner, Ph.D., 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 2000-2009, 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 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). His latest book is entitled The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty and was published in 2011. Santner continues to work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and religious thought.

David E. Wellbery, Ph.D., Chair of the Department, 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, Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies, joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2001 as the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor and 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; Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Department of Germanic Studies

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. Michelle has written numerous law review articles, book chapters, and magazine pieces in the field of land use law and is currently a frequent contributor to The Perspective section of The Chicago Tribune.

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