• 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

• T. Pfau. "Differentiation, Metamorphosis, and the Phenomenology of Life in Ovid and Goethe."  2010.
•  "The Letter of Judgment: Practical Reason in Aristotle, the Stoics, and Rousseau"."  2009.
•  "Modernity: Classical Antiquity, Romantic Theory, and Elegiac Form." The Oxford Handbook on the Elegy 2009 (forthcoming).

• Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era. review forthcoming in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, no. 25  (2009).
• T. Pfau, Helen Elam and Frances Ferguson, eds. "The Wordsworthian Enlightenment". Studies in Romanticism 48:2 (2009 (forthcoming)).