Colleagues from History, Religion and Politics appointed as Associated Faculty Members

Alongside its already highly interdisciplinary full-time faculty, the German Department also has a very active and highly distinguished group of Associated Faculty (http://german.princeton.edu/people/associated-faculty/) in departments ranging from Art & Archaeology and Comparative Literature to History, Music and Philosophy. The Department is delighted to announce that this group, which works closely not only with the regular faculty but also with both undergraduate and graduate students, has just been expanded by an additional three members: Profs. Katja Guenther (History), Leora F. Batnitsky (Religion) and Jan-Werner Müller (Politics). Katja Guenthe, an Assistant Professor of History and the Johanna and Alfred Hurley University Preceptor, mobilizes her training as a physician, neuroscientist and historian to study the history of modern medicine and the mind sciences. Trained as an M.D. in Germany before she earned a Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University, Guenther also holds an M.Sc. in neuroscience from the University of Oxford. She has published articles on the history of psychoanalysis, neurology, and medical therapy. The co-editor and translator of Sigmund Freud’s 1882 manuscript “Critical Introduction to Neuropathology,” Professor Guenther’s research focuses on the history of subjectivity and the ways in which modern ideas of the self have been constituted through the interplay of cultural and scientific norms. Her book project, Localization and Its Discontents – A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines, c. 1850–1950, explores divergent practices and shared theoretical assumptions within the medicine of mind and brain. Re-conceptualizing the reflex as a clinical and hermeneutic principle, she shows a common heritage for such diverse specialties as neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and provides new ways for thinking about the relationship between mind and brain in modernity.

Leora F. Batnitzky is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor and Chair in the Department of Religion. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011). Her current book project, tentatively titled “Conversion Before the Law: How Religion and Law Shape Each Other in the Modern World,” focuses on a number of contemporary legal cases concerning religious conversion in the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, and India. She is also currently completing an edited volume for the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought on modern Judaism and legal theory. The co-editor, with Peter Schäfer, of Jewish Studies Quarterly (http://www.mohr.de/en/journals/jewish-studies/jewish-studies-quarterly-jsq/journal.html), Professor Batnitzky is also the Director of Princeton’s Tikvah Project on Jewish Thought (http://www.princeton.edu/tikvah).

Jan-Werner Mueller, Professor of Politics and Acting Director of the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society, works on the history of modern political thought, liberalism and its critics, constitutionalism, religion and politics, and the normative dimensions of European integration. A prolific author and public intellectual (his public affairs commentary has appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken) he also directs the Project in the History of Political Thought at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values. Mueller is the author of Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (Yale UP, 2000), A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (Yale UP, 2003) and the editor of Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, (Cambridge UP 2002) and German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic (Palgrave 2003). An expanded and revised German edition of his more recent Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton UP 2007) was published by Suhrkamp in 2010.