HUMANITIES CENTER ALUMNAE

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Peter Fenves  (Northwestern)
Professor
2-326 Crowe Hall
1880 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208-2203
847-476-2966


Peter Fenves, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Co-director of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, is the author of A Peculiar Fate:   Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (Cornell University Press, 1991), " Chatter:"  Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford University Press, 1993), Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford University Press, 2001), and most recently Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (Routledge, 2003).   He is also the editor of Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Kant, Transformative Critique by Derrida (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), the co-editor of "The Spirit of Poesy:"  Essays on Jewish and German Literature and Philosophy in Honor of Géza von Molnár (Northwestern University Press, 2000), and the translator of Werner Hamacher's Premises: Literature and Philosophy from Kant to Celan (Harvard University Press, 1996).   Recently he has written a new introduction to Max Brod's novel, Tycho Brahe's Path to God (Northwestern University Press, 2006).
Professor Fenves has also written numerous articles on German literature and philosophy as well as contemporary French thought, including "Marx's Doctoral Thesis on Two Greek Atomists and the Post-Kantian Interpretations," The Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1986); "Image and Chatter: Adorno's Construction of Kierkegaard," Diacritics 22 (1992);   "From Empiricism to the Experience of Freedom," Paragraph 16 (1993);   "Continuing the Fiction: From Leibniz' 'petite fable' to Kafka's In der Strafkolonie," MLN 116 (2001);   "Of Philosophical Style--From Leibniz to Benjamin," Boundary 2 30 (2003);   "Marx, Mourning, Messianicity," in Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Samuel Weber and Hent de Vries; "Die Scham der Schönheit: einige Bemerkungen zu Stifter," in "Geteilte Aufmerksamkeit:" Zur Frage des Lesens, ed. Thomas Schestag; "Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin," in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly; "Measure for Measure:   Hölderlin and the Place of Philosophy," in The Solid Letter: New Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. Aris Fioretos;   "Die Unterlassung der Übersetzung," in Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin, ed. Christiaan L. Hart-Nibbrig;   "The Revelation of Irony: The Young Kierkegaard Listens to the Old Schelling," in International Kierkegaard Commentary:  "The Concept of Irony ," ed. Robert Perkins;   "Derrida and History: Some Questions Derrida Pursues in his Early Writings," in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen;   "What is Aufklärung (in Pennsylvania)?" in American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, ed. Marc Shell.  
Among his current projects is a study entitled The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Abstention from Philosophy, preliminary parts of which will be published in Walter Benjamin Studies (Continuum, 2005) and in the Benjamin-Handbuch (Metzler, 2006).   For the Gauss Lectures at Princeton University in the Fall of 2006 he will be giving a preliminary version of his work in progress, No One's Thing: The Idea of "Res Nullius" and the Search for a Critique of Violence.
Professor Fenves received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University (1989) and has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Harvard University in addition to Northwestern.  



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Patrick Greaney (U of Colorado: German)



Patrick Greaney's research and teaching focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in French and German.

His recent courses include “German Women Writers,” “Origins of the German Crime Novel,” “Foucault and Literature,” “The Modern German Novel (Musil, Kafka, Mann),” “Metropolis and Modernity,” and “The Theory of the Spectacle.”

He studied Comparative Literature at Yale and Johns Hopkins, and he has published articles on Hoelderlin, Nietzsche, Ungaretti, Fassbinder, Ilse Aichinger, and Urs Allemann. His book  Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin.  (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming in 2007) examines modern literary and philosophical texts about poverty in light of recent theories of power. His current research focuses on the use of montage and citation by French, Austrian, and Belgian writers and artists from the 1950s to the 1980s, especially the Vienna Group, Guy Debord, Marcel Broodthaers, and Heimrad Baecker.


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Elizabeth Rottenberg (DePaul University)

Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Prof. Rottenberg teaches philosophy at DePaul University. She is the editor and translator of Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 by Jacques Derrida (Stanford, 2001). She has earlier honed her skills as an acute interpreter of often notoriously difficult philosophic and literary texts with supple translations of Blanchot and Derrida's The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, 2000), Blanchot's Friendship (Stanford, 1997), and Jean-François Lyotard's Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford, 1993).

She teaches courses and works in the areas of early modern philosophy, contemporary French philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

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Marilyn Sides (Wellesley College)


My teaching ranges from creative writing (fiction and travel writing) to the study of and critical writing about literature, both poetry and fiction. My first published story, "The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife," appeared in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. A collection of stories, The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife and Other Tales, appeared in 1996 (Harmony) and my first novel, The Genius of Affection (Harmony) was published in August 1999.


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Zachary Sng (Brown University)

Zachary Sng works on the literature and philosophy of Britain and Germany around the 18th century, covering the intellectual and literary movements of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. His other interests include rhetoric, semiotics, and the history of aesthetics.


Dr. Sng is currently working on a book, Corrupting the Fountains of Knowledge: Language and Error from Locke to Romanticism, which looks at some important literary and philosophical texts from Germany and England. In it, he explores the relationship between language and understanding.

He is also working on a new project involving moderation, mediation, and other figurations of the "middle" in the 18th century.

Zachary Sng teaches courses in the Departments of German Studies and Comparative Literature, with a focus on German literature and aesthetics. He particularly enjoys small seminars that allow for close readings and discussions of interesting literary and philosophical texts.



J.D. Connor (Harvard: English and Visual Culture)   

Details: I am jointly appointed, an assistant professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of English and American Literature and Language. I'm also the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Film Studies (that's in VES).

Bio: Defended my dissertation in 2000; was a visiting assistant professor at Fordham 2000-1; then was an editor at SlateÊmagazine (slate.com). Came to Harvard in the fall of 2003. My current project ÒFeed the Machine: Hollywood Studios in the Neoclassical Era (1970Ð2005)Ó tells the corporate histories of contemporary Hollywood through close readings of landmark Þlms. Writings on Flight Plan, Braveheart, the Vivendi-Universal merger, and Jean-Paul Sartre have appeared in the Boston Globe, Representations, the Bafßer, and MLN.

Connor received his PhD in intellectual history from Johns Hopkins for a dissertation on the interplay between existentialism and social science in postwar American literature. His current projects include "A Single Nest: Hollywood Studios in the Neoclassical Era (1970–2005)," which tells the corporate histories of contemporary Hollywood through close readings of landmark films; "The Interpretation of Dreamworks;" and "These Things Actually Happened: Reality in the Sixties." His writings on Flight Plan, Braveheart, the Vivendi-Universal merger, and Jean-Paul Sartre have appeared in the Boston Globe, Representations, the Baffler, and MLN. Other recent work and teaching considers the use of systems theory by artists, the history of sound cinema, and E. L. Doctorow. As an undergraduate at Harvard ('92) Connor was a social studies concentrator.


Link: http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/faculty/connor.html




Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University)
Comparative Literature
Director of Graduate Studies

http://complit.princeton.edu/index.php?app=people&id=12


Daniel Heller-Roazen's areas of interest include Greek and Roman letters; the transmission of classical learning to the Arabic world and to the Latin West; the vernacular literatures of the European Middle Ages; medieval Arabic, Hebrew and Latin philosophy; and twentieth-century philosophy.
He is the author of Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (Zone Books, 2005, forthcoming in French, German, and Italian translations). He is also the editor of Giorgio Agamben's Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 1999). He has written articles on classical, medieval, and modern literature and philosophy in Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, Grey Room, Littérature, MLN, October, Paragraph, Parallax, and Romania. He is currently preparing the Norton Critical Edition of The Arabian Nights. His next book, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, will be published by Zone Books in April, 2007.

Recent Publications
1.  Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).), Stanford UP
2.  Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford UP
3.  The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).), Stanford UP
4.  Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society), The Johns Hopkins University Press
5.  Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Zone Books



Dana Hollander


Current Position: Assistant Professor / Canada Research Chair in Modern Jewish Thought, Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University
 
Bio: My areas of teaching and research are 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Modern Jewish Thought, and German-Jewish Studies.  My book, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2008), is a combined study of Jacques Derrida and Franz Rosenzweig.   My current research is on the theme of “the neighbor” in the works of the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen.
 


Website: http://univmail.mcmaster.ca/~danahol



Joanna Klink  (University of Montana)
Associate Professor
Office: LA 231
Phone: 243.2333
joanna.klink@mso.umt.edu

Profile:
M.F.A. Poetry, University of Iowa (1998), Ph.D. Humanities, Johns Hopkins University (2002). Creative Writing: Poetry. Author of They Are Sleeping (Contemporary Poetry Series, University of Georgia, 2000). Recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, 2003. Joanna Klink's poems have appeared in Boston Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. She has been a permanent member of the poetry faculty since the fall of 2001.

Akira Mizuta Lippit  (University of Southern California)
Professor, Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures
Professor, Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts

Akira Mizuta Lippit is Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California , where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Cultures in the College of Letters , Arts and Sciences.  Prior to his appointment at USC in 2005, Lippit held appointments in film studies at the University of California, Irvine, San Francisco State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  Since 1995, he has been a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Josai International University in Japan.

Lippit’s teaching and research focus on four primary areas: the history and theory of cinema, world literature and critical theory, Japanese film and culture, and visual cultural studies.  Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes two books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000).  In addition to his two completed books, Lippit is presently finishing a book-length study of experimental film and video, and has begun research for a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese cinema to the concept of the world.  Lippit’s published articles have appeared in scholarly journals of film, literature, and culture, including 1895, Afterimage, Assemblage, Criticism, Discourse, Film Quarterly, InterCommunication Quarterly, Modern Language Notes, Paragraph, Public, Qui Parle, among others.  They have also appeared in national and international exhibition and museum catalogues and in scholarly anthologies.  He has published widely in international venues, and his work has been translated in French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean.

Lippit is also active in film curating and programming and served during 2001-2004 as Director of the Film and Video Center at the University of California, Irvine.  He also serves regularly on juries at film festivals and for media organizations, and has been active in the film community as an interviewer of independent filmmakers and video artists.  Lippit is a member of the editorial board of Film Quarterly and is General Editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, which is now based at USC.  Raised in Japan and the United States, Lippit remains deeply involved in the intellectual community of Japan , where he regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes.
 

 

Liang Mao (Beijing University)

Liang Mao graduated from Fudan University, Shanghai (PRC) in 1992 with a BA in English. He got his Master's Degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May,1999, after which he was enrolled in the Humanities Center's Ph.D Program in Comparative Literature. He graduated from the Center in May, 2006 and his doctoral dissertation--Henry James and the Claim of Sociality--studies the relationship between individual consciousness and social forms in the novels and travel writings of Henry James.  He is now Lecturer of English and American Literature at Peking University, Beijing (PRC).  He teaches courses in 19th Century American Literature, Victorian Literature and his research interests also include literary theory, ethics, relationships between literature and moral philosophy.  He is now living in Beijing, China. 
 

Sharon Marcus (Columbia University)
Associate Professor, English

 
Areas of Interest:  19th- and 20th-century American literature; media studies; theories of gender and sexuality; disability studies; cultural studies; theories of transnationalism and globalization

Biographical statement:  I earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the Humanities Center in 1995 and began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994.  I received tenure there in 1999, and in 2002 moved to my current position at Columbia University.  I have written two books, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999) and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England  (Princeton University Press, 2007).  In addition to those books, I have published articles dealing with topics in urban studies and feminist theory, including "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention," "Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt: Universalism and Pathos," and "Comparative Sapphism." 

 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/fac_profiles.htm

 
Patrick Provost-Smith (Harvard Divinity School)
Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity


Patrick Provost-Smith joined the HDS faculty in 2003. His primary interests are in the confluence of intellectual history, theology, and religious ethics in early modern Christianity, and in approaches to contemporary critical theory and continental philosophy. His research focuses on challenges to traditions of Christian thought and practice brought about by European expansion, the development of overseas empires, and Christian encounters with others in the Americas and in Asia. His current book project, Holy War, Just War: Rhetoric and Moral Argument in the Conquest of the Americas, explores how arguments over just and unjust wars were applied, reshaped, and transformed by the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century, particularly as they were appropriated by advocates for a proposal for the conquest of China that emerged from Spanish missionaries in the Philippines. Future research will continue to explore the challenges faced in the sixteenth century by Christian theologians and missionaries in understanding indigenous cultures in the non-European world, concentrating on the primary treatise of the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta on the evangelization of the Indians in Peru, and on its global reception. Professor Provost-Smith offers courses in Renaissance and early modern Christian thought, Christianity in Latin America, the history and theology of Christian missions, philosophical and theoretical approaches to religious studies, and historical approaches to contemporary issues in religion and political philosophy (e.g., just war theory, political and liberation theologies, colonialism/postcolonialism, human rights).




William Scott (University of Pittburgh)
Assistant Professor, English

William Scott teaches 20th-century American
literature, African American literature and culture, and critical theory.
His current research interests are focused on questions involving
corporeality, performance, historicity, and representation, as well as the
problematic relation between "scenes of subjection" and the possibilities
of agency.  He is currently at work on a book entitled Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker in the United States.

William Scott received his MA in German (1997) and his PhD in Comparative
Literature (2003) from the Johns Hopkins University, studying in the areas
of romanticism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, African
American literature, and U.S. working-class literature. His doctoral
thesis dealt with radical (communist) American writers during the Great
Depression; corporeality; modernism; monopoly capitalism; and the critique
of representation.



(link to website)  http://www.english.pitt.edu/people/faculty/wdscott.html

Recent Publications:
•    Belonging to History: Margaret Walker’s For My People, MLN, Comparative Literature Issue, vol. 121 n. 5 (December 2006): 1083-1106.
•    Material Resistance and the Agency of the Body in Ann Petry’s The Street, American Literature, vol. 78 n. 1 (March 2006): 89-116.
•    Motivos of Translation: Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes, CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 5 n. 2 (fall 2005): 35-71.
•    “To Make Up the Hedge and Stand in the Gap”: Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder, Callaloo, vol. 27 n. 2 (spring 2004): 522-41.



Peter Starr (University of Southern California)
Dean, USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Professor of French and Comparative Literature

When his decanal duties allow, Peter Starr teaches French and Comparative Literature courses on literary theory, realist and naturalist fiction, French intellectual history, and the psychoanalysis of culture. He is the author of Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68 (Stanford, 1995) and Commemorating Trauma: The Paris Commune and Its Cultural Aftermath (Fordham, 2006). He has a long-term project on American culture of the nineteen-eighties and nineties entitled We the Paranoid: Tales from the Paranoia Industry. Before being named Dean of the College in July of 2006, Professor Starr served as College Dean of Undergraduate Programs. He has served as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and as Acting Chair of the Department of French and Italian. He has been President of the College Faculty Council and Chair of the University's Committee on Information Services, among other roles.

http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/administration/deans/
 
 


Antonia Szabari (University of Southern California)           

Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature

http:// www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/FREN-ITAL/html/fac_szabari.html.


Antónia Szabari is an Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. from the Humanities Center, at The Johns Hopkins University, in 2004. She holds a D.E.A. from the École des Hautes Etudes in Paris and a B.A. from the University of Szeged in Hungary.
She specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature, the literary and religious culture of early modern Europe, literary theory, and contemporary European literature. Her recent work has focused on early modern books as polemical tools: “Rabelais Parrhesiastes” in Modern Language Notes (2005) and “The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech” in Political Theologies (Fordham University Press, 2006). 
Her first book, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2008), presents an analysis of the linguistic violence that attends the polemical literature exchanged between French Catholics and French Protestants between 1532 and 1600. She is currently working on an article-length study of the novels of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész. 


Arnd Wedemeyer (Princeton University)
Assistant Professor, German

 www.princeton.edu/~awedemey

Arnd Wedemeyer studied philosophy, mathematics, history, linguistics, and logic at the Universities of Cologne and Munich before earning his Ph.D. at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation was entitled “Expanses of Thought: Interpretations of Space from Kant to Heidegger.” He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of the year 1977 in the two Germanies, which focuses not just on the terrorism of the RAF and the exodus of GDR intellectuals, but on Berlin theaters on both sides of the wall, the French invasion, suicide, a Heideggerian minister of the interior, and the historiographical reaction to the historical non-experience of 1977 that created the monstrous curiosity of one-year studies.

He is also working on a smaller project about the logic of disintegration in Hegel, Adorno, Canetti, Jelinek, and Botho Strauss. His past work includes essays on orientation in Kant's philosophy and the curse in political theology, and talks ranging in topic from phenomenology to dromology, from Husserl and Heidegger to Saint Kafka and remediated manuscripts.

He has taught a wide variety of courses in and beyond the German Studies curriculum, including classes on German philosophy, Freud, Heidegger, German-Jewish thinkers, pain and anaesthesia, 20th-century constitutions, the reason of state, mass culture and authenticity, auteur cinema, postmodern fiction, and the modern Jewish