Faculty

For a more detailed look at our faculty, including contact information please click on their photos:

Brigid Doherty

Associate Professor Brigid Doherty joined the faculty in German and Art & Archaeology at Princeton in 2003. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor of the History of Art and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. A member of the Steering Committees of the Programs in Media & Modernity and European Cultural Studies, she focuses her research and teaching on the interdisciplinary study of modern and contemporary art and literature, with special emphasis on relationships among the visual arts, literature, and aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory in German modernism.

Devin Fore

Assistant Professor Devin Fore received his PhD in German from Columbia University in 2005 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2006. He has been awarded grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright, Humboldt and Whiting Foundations, and was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2008-2009. His first book, Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art Between the Wars is forthcoming (2012) from MIT/October Books. A second book, All the Graphs: Soviet Factography and the Origins of Avant-Garde Documentary is also forthcoming. Fore has published articles in the journals New German Critique, October, Configurations and Grey Room, and has also translated a number of texts from both German and Russian.

Christiane Frey

Assistant Professor & Affiliated Professor in the History of Science Program Christiane Frey joined the department in 2009. She focuses her research and teaching on 17-19th-century European literature, philosophy, discourse analysis, and systems theory. She is currently completing a study on the history of “Moods and Feelings from Montaigne to Nietzsche,” co-editor of a volume on “Representation,” and author of numerous articles on authors from Goethe to Kafka and on topics ranging from “The Semiotics of Crisis and Madness in Jean Paul,” “Tropes of Secularization,” “Proportion and Mood in Kant’s Aesthetic Theory,” “The Examination of Men’s Wits from Huarte to Herder.” Her current research concerns the history and rhetoric of secularization and political theologies; the poetics and epistemologies of exemplarity; and a history of the examination. Frey’s course topics have included “Aesthetic Theory,” “On the History of Genius,” “The Novel’s Statistical Verisimilitude,” “The Political Theologies of Baroque Tragedy.”

Saskia Haag

Saskia Haag, Assistant Professor in the Fachbereich Literaturwissenschaft/Universität Konstanz, is Visiting Scholar at Princeton University for 2011-12 (Department of German and Program in European Cultural Studies). She has taught courses ranging from “Barocke Bildlichkeit” and “Lieddichtung um 1800” to “Topos Garten” and “Rahmungen in Kunst und Literatur”. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century European literature, art and culture, especially on the imagination of space. Her first book, Auf wandelbarem Grund. Haus und Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, will appear with Rombach Verlag in Spring 2012. An essay related to this book was recently published in the Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (2011), „Zentrifugale Architekturen – Adalbert Stifters Häuser“. Among her current projects is an essay entitled “Der Bindezauber der Komödie. Beobachtungen zu Johann Nestroys Theater,” which inquires into the role of interludes in popular theater around 1850. This essay emerges from a new research project that endeavors to locate literary devices such as rhyme within larger aesthetic and historical configurations.

Michael Jennings

Michael Jennings is the Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages and the Chair of the Department of German. He focuses his research and teaching on 20thcentury European literature, photography, and cultural theory. He is the author of two studies of the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin and the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin’s works. He is also the editor, with Detlef Mertins, of G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923-1926. Jennings’ course titles have included “Reading Photographic Writing,” “Neoavantgarde and Politics in the Long 1960s,” “Theories of Historicist Interpretation,” “Modernism and Modernity: Literature and the Visual Arts in France and Germany 1848-1914,” and “Theory of Mass Culture in the Frankfurt School.

Joel B. Lande

Joel B. Lande is the Cone-Haarlow-Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2011-2014). He is currently coordinating and lecturing in the two-semester sequence, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture: Antiquity to the Modern Period (HUM 216-219). Past classes have dealt with topics in eighteenth-century Drama and the European Enlightenment. He is working on a book on the emergence of literary comedy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Research interests include the semantics of classical literary forms in modern Europe, media history, and German philosophy from Kant to Wittgenstein.

Thomas Y. Levin

Associate Professor Thomas Y. Levin (PhD in Philosophy, Yale), is a media theorist, cultural critic and curator whose work explores the intersection of aesthetics, technology and politics. In the German Department at Princeton since 1991, Levin is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature, French and Italian, the School of Architecture and the Program in Media and Modernity. The translator and editor of Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament (Harvard UP, 1995), alongside two other German books on Kracauer’s work, Levin also conceived and curated the exhibition CTRL [SPACE], Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Technology) in Karlsruhe in 2001 and edited the catalogue under the same title (MIT Press) the following year. His recent publications include a co-edited volume of Walter Benjamin’s media-theoretical writings (The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Essays on Media, Harvard UP 2008) and a forthcoming volume of media-theoretical essays Techno-Aesthetica: Medientheoretische Schriften (Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag, 2012). Levin is on leave during AY 2011-2012 at the IKKM (Weimar) and as the Einstein Prize Fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für Literaturwissenschaftliche Studien at the FU-Berlin.

Sara S. Poor

Associate Professor & Director of Medieval Studies, Sara S. Poorbreceived her BA from Cornell University (Comparative Literature 1985) and her PhD from Duke University (Literature 1994). She is author of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) and co-editor of Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity (Palgrave Press 2007). Her current research concerns the intersection of late medieval German narratives of clever women and the roles of women in the production of fifteenth-century devotional books.

Sarah Pourciau

Assistant Professor Sarah Pourciau joined the faculty in 2009. Her main teaching and research interests include the history of German philosophy and theology, the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, modernist poetics, and the philosophy of language. She is currently completing a book project provisionally entitled Explications: Word Histories of High Modernism about the role of etymological argumentation, and the relationship of structuralist thinking to questions of historical genesis, in early 20th century linguistics, poetics, and philosophy. Past course titles have included “Germanic Theologies,” “German-Jewish Philosophies of History,” and “Theories of Self-Expression 1800/1900.”

Jamie Rankin

Senior Lecturer in German Jamie Rankin has coordinated the language program of the German department since 1991. In addition to teaching language courses and seminars on Second Language Acquisition, he has collaborated with graduate TA’s to develop a wide range of internet projects (both for classroom use and TA training) and to engage in classroom research. He has published numerous articles on second language education, several in collaboration with graduate TA’s in the department; is co-author of the widely used intermediate German textbook Handbuch zur deutschen Grammatik; and is currently developing a first-year textbook emphasizing input processing and lexical development. He is the recipient of the 1996 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and received a teaching award in 2008 by the Princeton chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Nikolaus Wegmann

Nikolaus Wegmann, Professor, received his intellectual training at Bielefeld (Promotion 1984), Cornell University, and Köln (Habilitation 1998). He has taught German literature at Bielefeld and Köln and media studies at Potsdam, the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen München, and at the Institut für Theater, Film und Fernsehwissenschaft Köln; he has also taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Washington. In his teaching and research, Wegmann focuses on German literature (from the Age of Enlightenment to GDR-Literature), the history of philology, literary theory, and media culture. His recent publications include an edited volume called Original–Ton: Zur Mediengeschichte des O-Tons (Konstanz 2007), and An Ort und Stelle: Zur Geschichte der konkreten Poesie in der DDR (DVjs vol. 84, 2010).