Office Location: 312 Allen Bldg, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address: pfau@duke.edu
Web Page: https://duke.academia.edu/ThomasPfau

Teaching (Spring, 2025):

• Ethics 320s.01, Narrative and moral crisis Synopsis

  Allen 318, MW 01:25 PM-02:40 PM

• Xtianthe 783.01, Poetry &/as theology - ii Synopsis

  Gray 110, M 04:55 PM-07:25 PM

• English 890s.02, Special topics seminar Synopsis

  Divinity tba, M 04:55 PM-07:25 PM

Office Hours:

Spring '25 Semester:

Wednesdays 12:15  - 1:15 PM (312 Allen)

Education:

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

Specialties:

Romanticism
Novels
Eighteenth Century Literature
Nineteenth Century Literature
Critical Theory

Thomas Pfau is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, with secondary appointments in Germanic Languages & Literatures and in the Duke Divinity School. A native of Germany, Prof. 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 three essay collections on English Romanticism, as well as special issues of South Atlantic Quarterly (1996) English Romantic Review ( 2010, 2011), and Modernist Cultures (2005). To date, he is the author of three monographs: Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP, 1997) Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) and Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame UP, 2013). He has published some thirty-five essays in numerous essay collections and scholarly journals on a wide range of writers, including Rousseau, A. Smith, Kant, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Shelley, Goethe, Beethoven, Eichendorff, Schleiermacher, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin and other writers and philosophers.

Curriculum Vitae

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. Pfau, T. "Grandeur et Misère de l'Homme : AI and/or Human Flourishing." Logos (United States) 27.3 (June, 2024): 11-32. [doi]
2. Pfau, T. "Response to My Interlocutors." Modern Theology 40.2 (April, 2024): 478-495. [doi]
3. Pfau, T. "Beethoven’s Heroic New Path: Organic Form and its Consequences." andererseits-Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies: Vol. 4, 2015.  2023. 87-100. [doi]
4. Pfau, T. Incomprehensible Certainty Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image.  June 2022.  [abs]
5. Aers, D; Pfau, T. "Exploring Christian Literature in the Contemporary and Secular University." Christianity and Literature 70.3 (September, 2021): 263-275. [doi]  [abs]