Kirk Wetters

Kirk Wetters
Professor
Department of Germanic Languages and Literature
Yale University
Humanities Quadrangle, #349
320 York St. 
New Haven, CT 06511 

kirk.wetters@yale.edu

Academic Positions

2015-present  Yale University
Full Professor of German

2009-2015 Yale University
Associate Professor of German

2004-2009 Yale University
Assistant Professor of German

Education
New York University, New York City, NY

Spring 2004 Dissertation Defense and Graduation 
Prof. Eva Geulen (dissertation director)

1999-2004 Ph.D. candidate in Germanic Languages Literature, NYU

Spring 2003 Viadrina University, Frankfurt an der Oder
Exchange between NYU’s Poetics and Theory certificate program and the 
graduate research seminar “Representation, Rhetoric, Knowledge”

2000-2001 Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main
DAAD scholarship: Two semesters study at the Institute for Comparative
Literature

1997-1999 M.A.: John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Program, NYU
(Thesis: “Beholding Hölderlin: Studies in the Textual Transmissibility of
Tone and Voice,” supervised by Prof. Ulrich Baer)

1991-1995 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
B.A. in Comparative Literature (German, English)

Academic Awards and Achievements

2017-2019 Fellow of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center

June 2017 Visiting Fellow at the Stefan Zweig Centre in Salzburg, Austria

2012 Publication-assistance granted by the Hilles Publication Fund (Yale)

2010-2011 Humboldt Foundation Fellowship Recipient (Bonn, Germany)

2010 Associate Leave for 2010-2011 sabbatical year

2008 Recipient of the Griswold Faculty Research Award for Research in Vienna, June 2008 (Yale)

2007 Publication-assistance granted by the Hilles Publication Fund (Yale)

2006 Morse Fellowship for the 2007-2008 sabbatical

2001-2004 Certificate in Poetics and Theory (NYU)

2000-2001 DAAD Grant (to Frankfurt am Main)

1999-2003 McCracken Fellowship (NYU)

Dissertation

“Life and Opinions” in the Foundations of Modern Literary Discourse. Focuses on political, philosophical and literary determinations of the concept of opinion in the last half of the 18th Century. The primary authors, Lichtenberg and Wieland, are read as offering a substantial and necessary corrective to Enlightenment’s efforts to define the sphere of politics as the public sphere.

Prof. Dr. Kirk Wetters

A. Books and Co-Edited Volumes

• The Authoritarian Personality: A Special Issue, co-edited with Christina Gerhardt (University of Hawai’i & Princeton) and Robyn Marasco (Hunter College & CUNY), Polity 51:1 (January 2022).

• Talking Prose: Narrative and Autobiography in Heimito von Doderer, co-edited with Gerald Sommer. Doderer-Gespräche: Schriften der Heimito von Doderer 
  Gesellschaft 7. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 2016.

• Demonic History from Goethe to the Present, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2014.

• “Das Dämonische”: Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit, co-edited with Eva Geulen (Frankfurt) and Lars Friedrich (Bonn), Munich: Fink Verlag 2014.

• Hans Blumenberg, co-edited with Rüdiger Campe (Yale) and Paul Fleming (Cornell) for Telos (Number 158, Spring 2012).

• The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas. New York (Fordham University Press), 2008, 292 pp.

B. Article Publications (contributions to books and journals)

• “Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie Today.” Forthcoming 2023.
• “Criteria of Tragic Form: Toward a Reconstruction of Lukács’s Earliest Critical Theory.” New German Critique. Forthcoming 2023.
• “Spectacle, Ideology, and Rhetoric of the Authoritarian Personality” (republication, originally 2016). Die Wiederkehr des autoritären Charakters. Eds. Manuel Clemens, Thorben Päthe & Marc Petersdorff. Forthcoming 2022. 
• “Fahrvergnügungen: The Limits of Autonomy in Societies of Control (J. G. Ballard and Franz Kafka).” Im Fuhrpark der Literatur: Kulturelle Imaginationen des Autos. Eds. Gwendolin Engels, Claude Haas, Dirk Naguschewski & Elisa Ronzheimer. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2022, 306-315.
• “‘Voici venu le temps des unilatéralités’: Spécialisation, differenciation et métier dans les Années de voyage de Wilhelm Meister.” Goethe, le second auteur: Actualité d’un inactuel. Eds. Denis Thouard & Christoph König. Paris: Éditions Hermann 2022, 239-262.
• “A Transcendent Word: Stefan Zweig’s Demonic Histories.” Fragments of Empire: Austrian Modernisms and the Habsburg Imaginary. Austrian Studies 28 (2020), 166-181.
• “Notes on the Theory-Hub Model of German Studies.” Re-Imagining the Discipline: German Studies, the Humanities and the University. Symposium contributions published as an online forum: https://futurehumanities.wixsite.com/re-imagining/kirk-wetters 
• “German’s Anti-National Niches,” a contribution to the forum, “Does German Cultural Studies need the Nation-State Model?” The German Quarterly 92.4 (Fall 2019), 494-498.
• “Genealogy Trouble: Secularization and the Leveling of Theory.” Genealogies of the Secular: The Makings of Modern German Thought. Eds. Willem Styfhals and Stepháne Symons. Albany: State University of New York Press 2019, 21-50.
• “Legends of the Origins of Hate: On the Etiology of a Societal Phenomenon.” Hass/Literatur: Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu einer Theorie- und Diskursgeschichte. Eds. Jürgen Brokoff and Robert Walter-Jochum. Bielefeld: Transcript 2019, 29-48.
• “The Law of the Series and the Crux of Causation: Paul Kammerer’s Anomalies.” Modern Language Notes 134:3 (April 2019), 643-660.
• “Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporality of Science and Theory.” Reframing Critical, Literary and Cultural Theories. Ed. Nicoletta Pireddu. Palgrave-MacMillan 2018, 63-90.
• “Who Cares About Society?: Sorge and Reification in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.” Material Worlds: Novelistic Matters of the Nineteenth Century. Colloquia Germanica 47.3 (2014) (published 2017), 243-262.
• “Spectacle, Ideology, and Rhetoric of the Authoritarian Personality.” Essay published online by the Platypus Affiliated Society. Platypus Review #91. 
• “‘Die Tiefe ist außen’ – Heimito von Doderers gegenreformerische Lebensreform,” co-authored with Robert Walter-Jochum. Die Literatur der Lebensreform: Kulturkritik und Aufbruchsstimmung um 1900. Eds. Thorsten Carstensen and Marcel Schmid. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2016, 307-324.
• “‘Gefühl eines Ungeheuerlichen’: Monster-Forms in Heimito von Doderer’s Die Dämonen.” Doderer-Gespräche: Schriften der Heimito von Doderer Gesellschaft 7. Eds. Gerald Sommer et. al. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 2016, 172-198.
• “‘Die Tiefe ist außen’ – Heimito von Doderers gegenreformerische Lebensreform,” co-authored with Robert Walter-Jochum. Die Literatur der Lebensreform: Kulturkritik und Aufbruchsstimmung um 1900. Eds. Thorsten Carstensen and Marcel Schmid. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2016, 307-324.
• “‘Gefühl eines Ungeheuerlichen’: Monster-Forms in Heimito von Doderer’s Die Dämonen.” Doderer-Gespräche: Schriften der Heimito von Doderer Gesellschaft 7. Eds. Gerald Sommer et. al. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 2016, 172-198.
• “Konjunktivisches Erzählen in Heimito von Doderers Die Dämonen.” Heimito von Doderers “Dämonen”-Roman: Lektüren. Eds. Eva Geulen and Tim Albrecht. Beiheft zur Zeitschift für deutsche Philologie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag 2016, 125-140.

Jena:

05.07.2023

PROF. DR. KIRK WETTERS (NEW HAVEN)
Die Vorgeschichte des „Sammelbands“. Zur Lesbarkeit deutschsprachiger Tagungs-, Konferenz- und Kongressbände der 1960er Jahre.

[Vortrag] Prof. Dr. Kirk Wetters_05.07.2023_FRIEDRICH-SCHILLER-UNIVERSITÄT JENA | News | 05.05.2023 | Stuttgart Research Centre for Text Studies | Universität Stuttgart (uni-stuttgart.de)

LMU München:

10.07.2023

PROF. DR. KIRK WETTERS (NEW HAVEN)
Die Vorgeschichte des „Sammelbands“. Zur Lesbarkeit deutschsprachiger Tagungs-, Konferenz- und Kongressbände der 1960er Jahre.

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