Research Interests for Thomas Pfau

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 interests have gradually broadened to include topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, philosophy, and intellectual history. Besides translating and editing two volumes of theoretical writings by Hölderlin and Schelling, he also edited two essay collections on English Romanticism, two special issues of English Romantic Review (forthcoming in 2010), and a special issue of Modernist Cultures (2005). To date, he is the author of two monographs: Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP, 1997) and Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). He has published some thirty essays in numerous essay collections and scholarly journals on a wide range of writers, including Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Goethe, Beethoven, Eichendorff, Schleiermacher, Thomas Mann, et al. – At present, he is completing a book-length study focused on key concepts of Modernity (Action; Personhood; Voluntarism; Teleology; Aesthetic Play).

Areas of Interest:

British & German Literature
Romanticism
Nineteenth-Century Music
Continental Philosophy and 19th C. Intellectual History

Recent Publications

1. Locke's Desire / Shaftesbury's Sentiment: Empiricism Conquers the Will, in Romanticism and the Emotions, edited by R. Sha and J. Faflak (2012), Johns Hopkins University Press [author's comments]
2. The Appearance of Stimmung: Play as Virtual Rationality,”, in Stimmung. Zur Wiederkehr einer ästhetischen Kategorie, edited by Anna-Katharina Gisbertz (March, 2011), Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, Germany
3. T. Pfau, "William Paley", in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, 4 vols., edited by Frederick Burwick, Nancy Goslee, et al. (2011), Blackwell, London, ISBN 1405188103
4. T. Pfau, "Bildungsroman", edited by Frederick Burwick, Nancy Goslee, et al., Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (2011), Blackwell, London, ISBN 1405188103
5. T. Pfau, Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, Modern Philology, vol. 108 no. 3 (2011), pp. 191-94