• Ph.D., State University of New York, Buffalo, 1989
• M.A., University of California, 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

• 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.."  Wiley, November, 2025. [doi]
• 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.."  Wiley, January, 2025, 191-196. [doi]
• Pfau, T. "Grandeur et Misère de l'Homme : AI and/or Human Flourishing."  June, 2024, 11-32. [doi]
• Pfau, T. "Response to My Interlocutors."  April, 2024, 478-495. [doi]
• 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.."  Springer Science and Business Media LLC, January, 2023. [doi]