Keynote Speakers
Amanda Anderson (Johns Hopkins University)
Amanda Anderson is Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. She specializes in critical theory and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Her work has focused on questions of modern self-understanding, disciplinary methodology, and the place of critique and argumentation across philosophy and literature (with a special emphasis on liberalism and proceduralism). She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006); The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, 2001); and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell, 1993). She has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, 2002).
Karl Heinz Bohrer (Stanford University)
Karl Heinz Bohrer is professor emeritus of Modern German Literary History and editor of Merkur. Bohrer received his Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1962 for his work on early-Romantic philosophy of history; while at Bielefeld University he rose to eminence with the 1977 publication of his work on the aesthetics of terror in the early work of Ernst Jünger. After a distinguished career as chief editor of and correspondent for the Literary Supplement of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1968-1982), Bohrer taught modern German literary history and literary and aesthetic theory at the Bielefeld University until 1997; since 2003 he is visiting professor at Stanford University. As scholar and editor of Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken, he has long been a prominent voice in German political and cultural debates. His intellectual achievements have received numerous accolades, including the Lessing-Preis für Kritik (2000), the Deutscher Sprachpreis (2002) and the Heinrich-Mann-Preis (2007). He is the author of many seminal publications, including Nach der Natur. Über Politik und Ästhetik (Hanser, 1988); Die Kritik der Romantik. Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne (Suhrkamp, 1989); Der Abschied. Theorie der Trauer: Baudelaire, Goethe, Nietzsche (Suhrkamp, 1996); Ästhetische Negativität (Hanser, 2002); Ekstasen der Zeit (Hanser, 2003); Imaginationen des Bösen. Zur Begründung einer ästhetischen Kategorie (Hanser, 2004).
Eva Geulen (Universität Bonn)
Eva Geulen is professor of modern German literature at the Universität Bonn. A specialist on literary theory and German literature since 1800, she received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and has taught at New York University, Stanford, and the university of Florence. Her current research is a comparative study of educational discourses around 1800 and 1900. She has written Worthörig wider Willen: Darstellungsproblematik und Sprachreflexion bei Adalbert Stifter (Iudicium, 1992); Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung (Junius, 2005); and Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel (Suhrkamp, 2002; Stanford, 2006).
Thomas Pfau (Duke University)
Thomas Pfau is Eads Family Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University. His research focuses on a large array of Romantic writers – philosophical, literary, historical – in England and Germany. His published work has explored such questions as paranoia as a mediation of historically induced anxiety, moral speech as performance, problems of historicism in contemporary Romantic Studies and the work of Walter Benjamin, and the Romantic conception of textual interpretation. He has translated and edited two volumes of theoretical writings by Hölderlin and Schelling, as well as edited or co-edited several essay collections. He is the author of two monographs, Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford, 1997) and Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840 (Johns Hopkins, 2005). At present, he is at work on an interdisciplinary study of Bildung in the nineteenth century.
Tilottama Rajan (University of Western Ontario)
Tilottama Rajan is Canada Research Chair in English and Theory and former Director of the Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. She has published on a wide range of Romantic writers, on philosophical issues, on contemporary theory, and, most recently, on encyclopedic thinking from post-Kantian idealism to deconstruction. She is the author and editor of eight books, including Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Cornell 1980); Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford 2002); After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory (as co-editor, Toronto, 2002); and Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (as co-editor, SUNY, 2004).
Joseph Vogl (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Joseph Vogl is professor of Modern German Literature, cultural and media studies at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and has taught at Princeton University and University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1990 and has become an authority in German literature since 1800, the history and theory of science/knowledge, and discourse and media theory. He has translated various key works in French poststructuralist theory and co-edited and contributed to several collections of essays on a wide range of topics, including German literature since Romanticism (Kafka, Musil, Stifter), political philosophy, the history and poetics of knowledge, violence and community, media theory etc. He is the author of such acclaimed monographs as Ort der Gewalt. Kafkas literarische Ethik (Fink, 1990), Kalkül und Leidenschaft. Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen (diaphanes, 2002) and Über das Zaudern (diaphanes, 2007). As an influential contributor to the public debate, he has made frequent appearances on television.
Panel Organizers
Lauren Goodlad (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is associate professor of English and a member of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She will be serving as Interim Director of the Unit during 2008-9 while Michael Rothberg is on sabbatical. She has a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, a Masters in English from NYU, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. A specialist in Victorian literature and culture, Goodlad also has research and teaching interests in gothic genres; critical, feminist, postcolonial and political theory; cultural studies; and literature in relation to contemporary understandings of liberalism, globalization, internationalism and development. She is the Victorianist Review Editor for Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (RaVoN), Co-Head of the Victorian Editorial Board for NINES, and a member of the Advisory Board for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.
Goodlad is the author of Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Johns Hopkins, 2003), co-editor of Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke, 2007), and co-editor of “Victorian Internationalisms,” a special issue of RaVoN which appeared in November 2007. Her articles and reviews have been published in journals such as American Literary History, Cultural Critique, ELH, Genre, MLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Studies. She is currently at work completing The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Literature, Internationalisms, and ‘The South’, selections from which have appeared or soon will appear in PMLA, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and The Politics of Gender in Trollope, ed. Regenia Gagnier, Margaret Markwick and Deborah Morse (Ashgate, forthcoming).
Oliver Kohns (Universität zu Köln)
Oliver Kohns is wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Universität zu Köln. He received his Ph.D. at the Universität Frankfurt in 2006. His research focuses on German literature and philosophy since 1800, media and literary theory, and political philosophy.He is the author of Die Verrücktheit des Sinns. Wahnsinn und Zeichen bei Kant, E.T.A. Hoffmann und Thomas Carlyle (Transcript, 2007).
Georg Mein (Université du Luxembourg)
Georg Mein is professor of modern German literature at the Université du Luxembourg. He received his Ph.D. at the Universität Bonn in 1999 and has taught at the Universität Bielefeld. In 2004, he has been appointed as Germany’s national Bologna promotor. He has published on literary theory and German literature since 1800, as well as on melancholy and other philosophical topics. He is the author of Die Konzeption des Schönen. Der ästhetische Diskurs zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik. Kant — Moritz — Hölderlin — Schiller (Aisthesis, 2000); Soziale Räume und kulturelle Praktiken. Über den strategischen Gebrauch von Medien (as co-editor, Transcript, 2004); Erzählungen der Gegenwart. Von Judith Hermann bis Bernhard Schlink (Oldenbourg, 2005); Hannah Arendt und Giorgio Agamben. Parallelen, Perspektiven, Kontroversen (as co-editor, Fink, 2008); Schriftkultur und Schwellenkunde (as co-editor, Transcript, 2008); BA-Studium GERMANISTIK. Ein Lehrbuch (as co-author, Rowohlt, 2008). He is also co-editor of the series Literalität und Liminalität, published by Transcript Verlag.
Bruce Robbins (Columbia University)
Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has also taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and has held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, and New York University. He is the author of Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2007); Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999); The Servant´s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke 1993); and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993). He is also the co-author of volume 5 (19th century) of the new Longman Anthology of World Literature (2003).
David Skilton (Cardiff University)
David Skilton is Chair of the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research at the University of Cardiff. He is currently working on illustration and illustrated texts, as well as on the art and literature of London, with particular emphasis on modes of urban vision and the multiplicity of urban narratives. He is the author of Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (Longman and St Martin's, 1972; Macmillan 1996); Defoe to the Victorians: Two Centuries of the English Novel (Penguin, 1985); and The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel (Routledge, 1993). A specialist on the work of Anthony Trollope, he was General Editor of the Trollope Society edition of the novels in 48 volumes.