View my c.v.

Welcome to my home page. The information contained here is designed to provide the visitor with my professional profile. I am not going to be cutesy or endeavor to be witty or or seek to burden you with anecdotes about my personal idiosyncracies. I just want to supply some information that you might be seeking because you logged onto this site. However, even if you are interested in what I do professionally, you definitely run the risk of being bored by my tediousness. You should know up front that I am a lover of footnotes, having early on discerned that a good scholarly book is actually two books in one: the author's narrative and his/her running commentary on the works used in her/his own argument. Well, at least that is the way scholarly books used to be. Ahh. I've dated myself.

I am Professor of German & Comparative Literature, Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies, and Immediate Past Chair of the Faculty Senate at Vanderbilt University. I began my career at my alma mater, Oakland University in Rochester, MI (1969-72) as an ABD, before moving on to the University of Pennsylvania (1972-1991), and then Vanderbilt in 1991. I have held visiting professorships at Swarthmore College, the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in München, and, as the Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rutgers. (Unfortunately, I had to turn down offers of visiting appointments at the Katholieke Universitet in Leuven, Belgium, and at the Universität Wien, Austria, because of other obligations). Along the way, I have held administrative positions: Undergraduate Chair in German at Penn, Director of Undergraduate Comparative Literature Program at Penn, Director of Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt, Associate Director (and now Director) of European Studies at Vanderbilt. University

I teach courses on the European Enlightenment and its legacies, the Sturm und Drang, Goethe and science, Nietzsche and literature, eighteenth-century narrative, evil in philosophy/literature/film, and on creativity in connection with chaos and complexity theory. My research interests also extend to the history of Germanics, the institutionalization of literature, literature and law, and empirical readership studies. My favorite individual German authors are Lessing, Wieland, S. LaRoche, Kant, Leibniz, Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Kleist, Nietzsche, Kafka, Hesse, and Grass. However, I have published on Allan Bloom, R. W. Emerson, Goldoni, and Shaftesbury, and and regularly teach works by Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Goldsmith, Ibsen, Pirandello, Richardson, and Mark Twain.

Somehow—what with remodeling two houses and intermittently helping out with the raising of three children (ok: very intermittently)—I have managed to publish or edit twelve books:

§         Fantasy and Reality: An Epistemological Approach to Wieland (author; P. Lang 1972)

§         Christoph Martin Wieland (author; Twayne Publishers1979)

§         Aufnahme - Weitergabe: Literarische Impulse um Lessing und Goethe (Co-editor; H. Buske Verlag 1982)

§         C.M. Wieland. Critical Essays. MLN German Issue (co-editor; 1984)

§         Crossing Boundaries: History and Theory of Essay Writing in Germany 1690-1815 (author; U of Pennsylvania P 1989)

§         Wieland. Epoche-Werk-Wirkung (co-author; C. H. Beck 1994)

§         Zensur und Kultur von der Weimarer Klassik bis zur Weimarer Republik (co-editor; Niemeyer 1995)

§         The Future of Germanistik in the USA (co-editor; Vanderbilt University P 1996)

§         Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment (co-editor; Rodopi 1999)

§         Lessing International—Lessing Reception Abroad (co-editor; Wallstein 2001)

§         The Many Faces of Germany (co-editor; Berghahn 2004)

§         Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (author; Rodopi 2006). 

 § “The Poet as Journalist and Essayist: C.M. Wieland.” Jahrbuch für Internationale
         Germanistik 12/1 &13/1 (1981/82). 105 pp.

 § "Lektüre und Lesertypologie im 18. Jahrhundert (1730-1770). Ein Beitrag zur
          Lesergeschichte am Beispiel Wolfenbüttels." Internationales Archiv für
          Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 8 (1983): 35-82. 

Among my more recent journal publications and book chapters are found

• “Faktum und Fiktion. Die Darstellung bürgerlicher Schichten zur Zeit des Sturm und Drang” (2006)
• “Abermals >Sektionsberichte des Lasters.= Bilaterale Reformvorstellungen in Literatur und Recht um1800” (2006)
• „Kopernikus und die bewegliche Schönheit: Schiller und die Gravitationslehre“ (2005)
• „Die Goethe-Gemeinde in Amerika“ (2005)
• “The Study of Germany in the United States” (2004)
• “Goethe and Schiller after Adorno: Using the Past to See the Future” (2004)
• “Disciplining History: Schiller als Historiograph” (2004)
• “’Die Doppelnatur der Geschichtsdarstellung’: JohannWilhlem Loebells Lessingbild und die Anfänge der Germanistik” (2004)
• “The History of German Departments in the United States” (2003)
• “Wielands Teutscher Merkur und die republikanische Freiheit des Lesers” (2003)
• “Lessing and the Project of a National Theater in Hamburg: ‘Ein Supplement der Gesetze’” (2003)
• ACriticism and Experience: Philosophy and Literature in the German Enlightenment@ (2002)
• AThe >Pregnant Point=: Goethe on Complexity, Interdisciplinarity, and Emergence@ (2002)

My next major book project is an examination of the critical reception of the Sturm und Drang as counter culture 1770-1990. Underway is also an exploration of the art of criticism in German Romanticism.