Jane O. Newman
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine

John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Spring 2017

Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her PhD at Princeton University and her BA at Yale University. She has recently completed a term as Chair of the Department of European Languages and Studies. Newman is interested in dialogues between the pre- and early-modern past and the modern and postmodern present. She has written three books, Pastoral Conventions (Hopkins, 1990), The Intervention of Philology (North Carolina, 2000), and Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Cornell, 2011), which received Honorable Mention for the Scaglione Prize of the Modern Language Association. She also completed a new translation of Erich Auerbach’s essays, Time, History and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton, 2014), which won the Modern Language Association Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature. Newman has also published on comparative literature, new historicism, and cultural materialism. Her awards include Guggenheim and Humboldt fellowships, and the M.H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Newman was also a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Read about Jane Newman in Süddeutsche Zeitung

Listen to an interview with Jane Newman on Deutschlandradio

Project Description

Auerbach’s Worlds: Early/Modern Mimesis between Religion and History

At the Academy, she will finish her book on the German-Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) titled “Auerbach’s Worlds.” Auerbach belonged to a generation of German-Jewish scholars whose work, she argues, became the foundation of most humanistic disciplines in the United States. She locates his readings of writers from Augustine to Vico (one of his “worlds”) in dialogue with work by early to mid-twentieth-century phenomenologists and existentialists—French and German, Protestant and Catholic (a second of his “worlds”). Newman then traces how these debates traveled from their German context to the United States in the mid-twentieth century, and how they continue to resonate today. “Auerbach’s Worlds” proposes a new methodology for constructing a truly global canon (based on Auerbach’s own), and recovers the centrality of Europe’s complex philosophical and theological past for US intellectual history. For Auerbach and other exiles from Hitler’s Germany, European pre- and early modernity became their privileged object of study precisely because of the ruinous modernity of what Arendt called their own “dark times.” Newman shows that Auerbach’s famous theory of mimesis thus needs to be understood in terms of the notion of “worldliness” derived from the disastrous historical moment which charged his studies of the past with such urgency.

Academy Activities

01 Feb 17

Christian Existentialism and a Jewish Life: The Worlds of Erich Auerbach

The German-Jewish literary scholar and critic Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) fled Nazi Germany in 1935, settling first in Turkey, then in the United States. Professor of comparative literature Jane O. Newman explores his readings of writers from St. Augustine through Montaigne to Virginia Woolf, setti ...

Read more
30 Jan 17

Fellow Spotlight: Jane O. Newman

Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. At the Academy, she is finishing her book on the German-Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), titled “Auerbach’s Worlds.” Auerbach belonged to a generation of ...

Read more
Back To Top