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 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

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