Andreas Huyssen

Andreas Huyssen (born 1942) is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Center for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German Critique, the leading journal of German studies in the United States.

Life

He was born in Germany in 1942. Huyssen received his doctorate from the University of Zürich in 1969, and taught at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee from then until 1986, when he joined the faculty at Columbia. From 1986 to 1992 and in 2005 he served as head of Columbia's Germanic Languages and Literatures department. From 1998 to 2003 he was a director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society.

Work

Huyssen is particularly known for his work on 18th-20th century German literature and culture, international modernism and postmodernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, cultural memory, historical trauma, urban culture, and globalization. His work has appeared in translation in Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages.

He is currently working on a book project about modernist miniatures, a little studied experimental form of modernist writing, widespread in French and German modernism from Charles Baudelaire to Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin.

In addition to his editorship of the New German Critique, Huyssen serves on the editorial boards of October, Constellations, and Germanic Review.

Personal

Married to New York Times correspondent Nina Bernstein, Huyssen is also a longtime friend of Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and often hosts him when the writer comes to the US. The two teach an undergraduate class together at Columbia called "Words and Pictures," which examines problems of visual representation in literature, particularly theories of ekphrasis.

Selected works

• Drama des Sturm und Drang (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)
• Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (2008)

External links

• Faculty page for the Columbia department of Germanic Languages and Literature
• Biography at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society
• Andreas Huyssen on Günter Grass
• Huyssen’s acceptance speech for the Mark Van Doren Award
• Interview with Andreas Huyssen in Barcelona Metropolis Magazine, Winter, 2010.
• Review of Modernism after Postmodernism by Andreas Huyssen in Barcelona Metropolis Magazine, Autumn, 2010.