Thomas Pfau

Contact Info:

Office Location:	312 Allen Bldg, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone:	(919) 684-2741
Email Address:
Web Page:	https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KJ1VKS

Teaching (Spring 2024):

• Ethics 320s.01, NARRATIVE AND MORAL CRISIS Synopsis

  Reuben-coo 329, MW 10:05 AM-11:20 AM

• Xtianthe 782.01, POETRY &/AS THEOLOGY I Synopsis

  Gray 110, M 04:55 PM-07:25 PM

• English 890s.03, SPECIAL TOPICS SEMINAR Synopsis

  Divinity tba, M 04:55 PM-07:25 PM

Office Hours:

Fall 2022 Semester:

Wednesday 11:00 am-12:00 pm (312 Allen) and by appointment

Education:

• Ph.D. State University of New York, Buffalo, 1989
• M.A. University of California, Irvine, 1985
• BA University of Constance, Germany, 1982

Specialties:

19th Century Literature
Critical Theory
Literary History & Criticism

Research Interests: 19th Century Literature; Romanticism

Thomas Pfau is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, with secondary appointments in Germanic Languages & Literatures and in the Duke Divinity School. A native of Germany, Prof. 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 three essay collections on English Romanticism, as well as special issues of South Atlantic Quarterly (1996) English Romantic Review ( 2010, 2011), and Modernist Cultures (2005). To date, he is the author of three monographs: Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP, 1997) Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) and Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame UP, 2013). He has published some thirty-five essays in numerous essay collections and scholarly journals on a wide range of writers, including Rousseau, A. Smith, Kant, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Shelley, Goethe, Beethoven, Eichendorff, Schleiermacher, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin and other writers and philosophers.

Curriculum Vitae

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

• Thomas Manganaro

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Pfau, T. "Response to My Interlocutors." Modern Theology 40.2 (April, 2024): 478-495. [doi]
2. Pfau, T. Incomprehensible Certainty Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image.  June 2022.  [abs]
3. Aers, D; Pfau, T. "Exploring Christian Literature in the Contemporary and Secular University." Christianity and Literature 70.3 (September, 2021): 263-275.  [abs]
4. Pfau, T. "Kantian Aesthetics as "soft" Iconoclasm." Logos (United States) 24.3 (June, 2021): 69-88. [doi]
5. Pfau, T. "Absolute Gegebenheit: Image as aesthetic Urphanomen in Husserl and Rilke." Phenomenology to the Letter: Husserl and Literature.  2020. 227-260. [doi]  [abs]