Prof. Michael Saman Joins Faculty as Lecturer for AY13–14

Prof. Michael Saman will join the Princeton German Department as a Lecturer this Fall. Saman did his undergrad training at Duke University (where he wrote his thesis with Fred Jameson) and then went on to do graduate work in Philosophy and Germanistik at the FU-Berlin and in German at Harvard University. His dissertation (directed by Peter Burgard with Peter Fenves and Oliver Simons) was on “Goethe as a Reader of Kant, 1788-1832: Judgment, Grace, and the Most Desirable Calling.” Prof. Saman has taught in the German Departments of the College of William & Mary, Brown University and, for the last two years, as the recipient of a prestigious ACLS New Faculty Fellowship in the German Department at UCLA. Besides the revision of his 2010 dissertation as a book entitled Peculiar Analogues’: Goethe As a Reader of Kant, Michael is also working on a volume entitled The Voice of Time: W.E.B. Du Bois and Classical German Thought which he describes as “a study of the incorporation of texts and ideas from Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, and Hegel in The Souls of Black Folk, focusing on the impact of German historicism on Du Bois’s political thought.” In the Fall term Saman will teach Ger207 “Society, Politics and Culture in Germany, 1890-1945” and an upper-level seminar, cross listed with African American Studies, Ger307/AAS307 “Race and Classical German Thought.”