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

Office Hours:

Spring 2012
Wednesdays 2:30-3:30pm

Education:

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

Specialties:

Nineteenth Century Literature
Romanticism
Novels

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 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 two essay collections on English Romanticism, two special issues of English Romantic Review (forthcoming in 2010), and a special issue of Modernist Cultures (2005). To date, he is the author of two monographs: Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP, 1997) and Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). He has published some thirty essays in numerous essay collections and scholarly journals on a wide range of writers, including Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Goethe, Beethoven, Eichendorff, Schleiermacher, Thomas Mann, et al. – At present, he is completing a book-length study focused on key concepts of Modernity (Action; Personhood; Voluntarism; Teleology; Aesthetic Play).

Curriculum Vitae

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. "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]
2. "The Appearance of Stimmung: Play as Virtual Rationality,”." Stimmung. Zur Wiederkehr einer ästhetischen Kategorie. Ed. Anna-Katharina Gisbertz. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, March, 2011.
3. T. Pfau. ""William Paley"." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, 4 vols.. Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Goslee, et al.. Blackwell, 2011. 
4. T. Pfau. ""Bildungsroman"." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Goslee, et al.. Blackwell, (2011)
5. T. Pfau. Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are.  Modern Philology 108.3 (2011): 191-94.