participants
HUBERTUS von AMELUNXEN is Walter Benjamin Chair at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fe, Switzerland and, from 2001-2005, was Founding Director and Professor at the International School for New Media in Lübeck (Germany). In May 2005 the French Minister of Culture appointed him as General Director of the European School of Visual Arts in Angoulême and Poitiers. A curator of many international exhibitions and a philosopher of photography and the visual arts, he is the author or editor of such books as Victor Burgin: Voyage to Italy (2006), Theorie der Photographie IV, 1980-1995 (2000); Die aufgehobene Zeit. Die Erfindung der Photographie durch William Henry Fox Talbot (2001); and Photography After Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age (1997).
ANDREW BENJAMIN is a Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash University, Melbourne (Australia). He is the author of more than ten books, including Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (2006) and Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997) as well as the editor of many others, including Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (1993), and Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (2002).
WILLE BOLLE is Professor of German at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil). Among his authored and edited books are Physiognomik der modernen Metropole: Geschichtsdarstellung bei Walter Benjamin (1994; Brazilian version, Fisiognomia da metrópole moderna, 1994, 2nd. ed. 2000) and Blickwechsel: Akten des XI. Lateinamerikanischen Germanistenkongresses (three volumes, 2003). He also is the editor of the Brazilian edition of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (2006).
VITTORIA BORSÒ is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (Germany). Among her monographs and edited books are Topografia dell`estraneo. Confini e passaggi (2006); Geschichtsdarstellung. Medien-Methoden–Strategien (2004); Mexiko jenseits der Einsamkeit. Versuch einer interkulturellen Analyse - Kritischer Rückblick auf die Diskurse des Magischen Realismus (1994); and Metapher: Erfahrungs- und Erkenntnismittel. Die metaphorische Wirklichkeitskonstitution im französischen Roman des XIX. Jahrhunderts (1985).
TAMARA EISENBERG studies philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel).
ALEXANDER GELLEY is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He has taught at The City College, New York, and Cornell, and been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University, The University of North Carolina, and Princeton. His publications include Narrative Crossing - Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction, Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (ed.) and numerous essays on the modern novel and literary theory.
ROLF GOEBEL is Professor of German at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. He is the author of Benjamin heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (2001), Constructing China: Kafka's Orientalist Discourse (1997), and Kritik und Revision: Kafka's Rezeption mythologischer, biblischer und historischer Traditionen (1986). Among is edited books is A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin (in press).
UDI GREENBERG is a doctoral candidate in history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). He has published articles on Walter Benjamin, among others.
BERNHARD GREINER is Professor of German at the University of Tübingen (Germany) and currently Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Davis. Among his many books are Die Komödie. Eine theatralische Sendung (2006); Beschneidung des Herzens. Konstellationen deutsch-jüdischer Literatur (2004), Eine Art Wahnsinn. Dichtung im Horizont Kants – Studien zu Goethe und Kleist (1994); and Friedrich Nietzsche. Versuch und Versuchung in seinen Aphorismen (1972). From 2000 – 2002 he served as the Walter Benjamin Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
CHRISTINE IVANOVIC is Professor of German at the University of Tokyo (Japan). Dr.phil.habil in German and Comparative Literature. She is the author of two books on Paul Celan's readings of Russian literature (1996) and numerous articles on European literature and cultural studies. She also is the editor of several volumes, most recently Kulturfaktor Schmerz (2008, with Yoshihiko Hirano) and Transforming Texts / Text Transformationen. Beiträge zum Werk Yoko Tawadas (forthcoming 2009).
MICHAEL JENNINGS is Professor and Chair of German at Princeton University. Among his monographs are The Author as Producer: A Critical Biography of Walter Benjamin (2009) and Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (1987). He is the editor, among other books, of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media (2008) and The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006). He also is the general editor of the four-volume Harvard edition of Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings (1996-2003).
SVEN KRAMER is Professor of German at the Universität Lüneburg (Germany). He is the author of five books, including Die Folter in der Literatur. Ihre Darstellung in der deutschsprachigen Erzählprosa von 1740 bis "nach Auschwitz" (2004); Walter Benjamin zur Einführung (2003, 2nd ed. 2004); Auschwitz im Widerstreit. Zur Darstellung der Shoah in Film, Philosophie und Literatur (1999); and Rätselfragen und wolkige Stellen. Zu Benjamins Kafka-Essay (1991).
VIVIAN LISKA is Professor of German and Director of the Insitute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Among her authored and edited books are When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in Twentieth-Century German-Jewish Literature (in press), Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe (2007), Giorgio Agambens leerer Messianismus (2008), and Modernism (2007).
MAURO PONZI is Professor of German Literature at the University of Rome (La Sapienza). The editor of the “Hermann-Hesse-Jahrbuch” (Tübingen), he is the author or editor of, among other books, Arte e natura: imitazione e simulazione (2008), Organizzare il pessimismo. Walter Benjamin e Nietzsche (2007), Theologie und Politik. Walter Benjamin und ein Paradigma der Moderne (2005), and L'angelo malinconico. Walter Benjamin e il moderno (2001).
GERHARD RICHTER is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of three books, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers from Damaged Life (2007); Ästhetik des Ereignisses. Sprache—Geschichte—Medium (2005); and Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (2000; 2nd. ed. 2002). Among his four edited books is Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (2002).
KARL IVAN SOLIBAKKE is Love Distinguished Research Professor in Modern German Culture at Syracuse University, where he is completing two volumes on cultural memory in visual and textual studies. In addition to his monograph on Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, he has also edited volumes and published articles on Benjamin, Jelinek, Heine, Uwe Johnson, Goethe, Schiller, Kafka, and Gustav Mahler. General Manager of the International Walter Benjamin Society, he is co-editor of the society's publication series, Benjamin Blätter.
ISAAC TUBB teaches in the Department of German, Slavic, and Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He recently completed his dissertation, "Illness and Insight: Melancholic Encounters With(in) History in Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter Benjamin, and Peter Handke" in the Department of German at the University of California, Davis.
DANIEL WEIDNER is Primary Investigator of the project "Sakramentale Repräsentation" at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (Germany). He is the author or editor of Nachleben der Religionen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zur Dialektik der Säkularisierung (2007), Figuren des Europäischen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven (2006), and Gershom Scholem: Politisches, esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben (2003).
LILIANE WEISSBERG is Christiopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her books and edited volumes are Picture This! Writing with Photography (forthcoming); Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997, 3rd ed., 2004); Edgar Allan Poe (1991); and Geistersprache. Philosophischer und literarischer Diskurs im späten achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1990).
BERND WITTE is Professor of German at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (Germany) and President of the International Walter Benjamin Sociey. Among his many books are Jüdische Tradition und literarische Moderne: Heine, Buber, Kafka, Benjamin (2007); Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (German 1985, English 1997); Walter Benjamin. Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker — Untersuchungen zu seinem Frühwerk (1976). He also is the editor of numerous volumes, most recently Topographien der Erinnerung. Zu Walter Benjamins Passagen (2008).
