Duke the Program In Literature

  • Thomas Pfau

  • Professor and Eads Family Professor of English
  • Literature
  • 502 Allen Building
  • Campus Box 90015
  • Phone: (919) 681-3098, (919) 684-2741
  • Fax: (919) 684-4871
  • Homepage
  • Secondary web page
  • Curriculum Vitae

  • Specialties

    • Nineteenth Century Literature
    • 19th Century Literature
    • Romanticism
    • Critical Theory
    • Novels
    • Literary History & Criticism

  • Research Description

    A native of Germany, Thomas Pfau began his academic career in 1980 as a student of History and Literature at the University of Constance. In 1982, he came to the U.S. where, at UC-Irvine, he joined the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature and Theory. In 1985, he continued his studies in the Comparative Literature Program at SUNY-Buffalo where he received his Ph.D. in 1989 with a dissertation on self-consciousness in Romantic poetry and theory (Wordsworth, Shelley, et al.). Since then, his main interests have broadened to include a large array of Romantic writers -philosophical, literary, historical- in England and Germany. His published work has explored such questions as paranoia as an mediation of historically induced anxiety (in Blake, Godwin and the 1794 Treason Trials); moral speech as performance (in Hegel and J. L. Austin); problems of historicism in contemporary Romantic Studies and the work of Work of Walter Benjamin; the Romantic conception of textual interpretation (in Schleiermacher). Besides translating and editing two volumes of theoretical writings by Hölderlin and Schelling, he also edited two essay collections on English Romanticism . Following his 1997 book, Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP), he has just completed a study of English and German Romanticism, entitled Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840.

  • Education

      • Ph.D.,
      • Comparative Literature,
      • State University of New York at Buffalo,
      • 1989
      • M.A.,
      • Comparative Literature,
      • University of California at Irvine,
      • 1985
      • BA,
      • Double Major in English and History,
      • University of Constance, Germany,
      • 1982

  • Awards, Honors and Distinctions

      • Finalist for Excellence in Teaching Award,
      • DSG,
      • February 2003
      • Dorothy Collins Brown Fellow at the Henry Huntington Library,
      • Summer 1993
      • Dissertation defended with distinction,
      • State University of New York at Buffalo,
      • Nov. 1988
      • Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship,
      • 1988-1999
      • Ph.D. qualifying examinations passed with distinction,
      • State University of New York at Buffalo,
      • Mar. 1987
      • University Fellowship for Graduate Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo,
      • 1985-1988
      • Regents of the University of California Fellowship for Graduate Studies,
      • 1983-1984
      • German Academic Exchange Fellowship for Study in the United States,
      • 1982-1983

  • Recent Publications

      • review of Tilottama Rajan, Romantic Narrative (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010).
      • The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation
      • (July, 2013)
      • .
      Publication Description

      forthcoming

      • "Rethinking the Image (with some reflections on G. M. Hopkins)."
      • Yearbook for Comparative Literature
      • (April, 2013)
      • .
      • "A Note on the pre-History of European Nihilism: Eroticism and Damaged Life in Don Giovanni."
      • andererseits: Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies
      • 2
      • (2013)
      • .
      • (forthcoming)
      • "Rational Theology and the Catholic Critique of Modernity, 1780-1830."
      • The Oxford Handbook on European Romanticism.
      • Ed. Paul Hamilton (Kings C, London).
      • 2013.
      • (forthcoming)
      • T. Pfau.
      • Re/Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions & Responsible Knowledge.
      • University of Notre Dame Press,
      • 2013.
      • (In production; expected publication date, September 2013 (MS length: 295,000 words)).
  • View All Publications

  • PhD Students

    • Selin Ever
      • January 01, 2011 - present
    • Magdalena Zurawski
      • May 01, 2010 - present
      • Thesis: Cultivating the Nation: Virtue, Capital, and Early American Literature
    • Lynda Nyota
      • May 30, 2009 - present
    • Erin Allingham
      • Directing the dissertation of Erin Allingham (English - UNC)
      • Thesis: The Utilitarian Legacy in Higher Education: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, and the Use of Knowledge
Thomas Pfau
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