Office Location: 313 Allen
Office Phone: 919-681-3098; 919-684-6820
Email Address: pfau@duke.edu

Office Hours:

Mondays 2:45-3:30pm

Education and Interests:

Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo

19th Century Literature; Romanticism

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 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), his most recent study of English and German Romanticism, entitled Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840 is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press

Curriculum Vitae

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. T. Pfau. "The Letter of Judgment: Practical Reason in Aristotle, the Stoics, and Rousseau"." The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation  (2009)
2. T. Pfau. "Modernity: Classical Antiquity, Romantic Theory, and Elegiac Form." The Oxford Handbook on the Elegy.  2009 (forthcoming).
3. T. Pfau. Helen Elam and Frances Ferguson, eds. "The Wordsworthian Enlightenment".  Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (2009 (forthcoming)).
4. T. Pfau. Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are.  Modern Philology 106.2 (2009 (forthcoming)).
5. T. Pfau. "Melancholy Gift: Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Thought." Romantic Praxis  (June, 2008)

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