Office Location: 303H Allen Bldg, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address: pfau@duke.edu
Web Page: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KJ1VKS

Teaching (Spring, 2026):

• English 101s.01, The art of reading Synopsis

  Allen 318, MW 10:05 AM-11:20 AM

• English 490s.01, Special topics lang/lit Synopsis

  Allen 317, MW 01:25 PM-02:40 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. "BlaisePascal, Writings on Grace: The Complete Écrits sur la grâce, translated with an essay by Paul J.Griffiths(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2025), xxvi +173 pp.." Modern Theology Wiley, (November, 2025) [doi]
2. Pfau, T. "Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by CharlesTaylor (Harvard, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), ix + 598 pp.." Modern Theology 41.1Wiley, (January, 2025): 191-196. [doi]
3. Pfau, T. "Grandeur et Misère de l'Homme : AI and/or Human Flourishing." Logos United States 27.3 (June, 2024): 11-32. [doi]
4. Pfau, T. "Response to My Interlocutors." Modern Theology 40.2 (April, 2024): 478-495. [doi]
5. Pfau, T. "Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media, trans. Nils F. Schott. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Xiv + 391 pp.." Continental Philosophy Review Springer Science and Business Media LLC, (January, 2023) [doi]