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

Research Interests:  

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 main interests have broadened to include a large array of Romantic writers -philosophical, literary, historical- in England and Germany. His published work has explored such questions as paranoia as an mediation of historically induced anxiety (in Blake, Godwin and the 1794 Treason Trials); moral speech as performance (in Hegel and J. L. Austin); problems of historicism in contemporary Romantic Studies and the work of Work of Walter Benjamin; the Romantic conception of textual interpretation (in Schleiermacher). Besides translating and editing two volumes of theoretical writings by Hölderlin and Schelling, he also edited two essay collections on English Romanticism . Following his 1997 book, Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP), he has just completed a study of English and German Romanticism, entitled Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840.

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

Articles in a Collection

•  "Locke's Desire / Shaftesbury's Sentiment: Empiricism Conquers the Will." Romanticism and the Emotions Ed. R. Sha and J. Faflak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.  [author's comments]
•  "The Appearance of Stimmung: Play as Virtual Rationality,”." Stimmung. Zur Wiederkehr einer ästhetischen Kategorie Ed. Anna-Katharina Gisbertz. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, March, 2011.
• T. Pfau. ""William Paley"." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, 4 vols. Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Goslee, et al.. Blackwell, 2011.
• T. Pfau. ""Bildungsroman"."  Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Goslee, et al.. Blackwell, 2011.

• T. Pfau, Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are. Modern Philology 108:3 (2011): 191-94.