Eric L. Santner, Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies 2000-2009, was named the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies in September 2003. He joined the Chicago department in autumn 1996 after twelve years of teaching at Princeton University. His books include Friedrich Hölderlin. Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination; Stranded Objects. Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany; My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (winner Honorable Mention, Koret Jewish Book Prize in Philosophy and Religious Thought; Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA; Honorable Mention, Rene Wellek Prize of the ACLA); Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Moishe Postone. Two new books appeared in 2005-06: The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (University of Chicago Press), written with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press). Santner continues to work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and religious thought.
The event is supported by the Global Modernisms Initiative, the PhD in Literature, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.