Andreas Huyssen
Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Andreas Huyssen served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003) and chaired the Department of Germanic Languages from 1986-1992 and again from 2005-2008. His research and teaching focus on 18th-20th-century German literature and culture, international modernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, postmodernism, cultural memory of historical trauma in transnational contexts, and, most recently, urban culture and globalization. He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique (1974-), and he serves on the editorial boards of October, Constellations, Germanic Review, Transit, Key Words (UK), Critical Space (Tokyo), Memory Studies (UK), Lumina (Brazil), Comunicação & Cultura(Portugal). In 2005, he won Columbia's coveted Mark van Doren teaching award.
Huyssen has published widely in German and English and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Swedish, Danish, Slovenian, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, and Chinese. His books include Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung. Studien zur frühromantischen Utopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur (1969), Friedrich Schlegel. "Athenäums"-Fragmente und andere Schriften (1978, latest reprint 2005), Drama des Sturm und Drang (1980), The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions (ed. with Teresa de Lauretis and Kathleen Woodward, 1980), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (ed. with Klaus Scherpe, 1986), Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (ed. with David Bathrick, 1989), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), and the edited volume on the culture of non-Western cities entitled Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (2008). His most recent collection of essays, so far only published in Spanish, is Modernismo después de la posmodernidad (2010). Other recent titles include William Kentridge and Nalini Malani: The Shadowplay as Medium of Memory (2013) and Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (2015).
He currently continues work on two projects: a study of modernist miniatures, an experimental form of modernist writing, widespread in French and German modernism from Baudelaire to Rilke, Benn, Kafka, Kracauer, Jünger, Musil, Benjamin, and Adorno. And a consideration of the overlaps and tensions between the contemporary discourses of memory and human rights.
Working Group Affiliation