Leonard Barkan

Class of Fall 2009, Class of Spring 2010

Class of 1943 University Professor, Department of Comparative Literature

Princeton University

On Gazing at Art and Changing Your Life

In his project at the Academy, Barkan focused on the relation between fragments of classical art and the modern experience of viewing them. Conceived as a story about the historical intersection between aesthetics and subjectivity, Barkan’s project specifically focuses on Berlin’s relation to the classical heritage as it is expressed in the testimonies of Winckelmann and Rilke, as well as in the display of classical art in the modern museum.

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Since his time as an American Academy Fellow, in fall 2009, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper with Princeton University Press, and Berlin for Jews, with the University of Chicago Press (2016). During 2010-2011, Barkan gave the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan; his subject, which he first aired at the Academy in Berlin, was “Food Culture and High Culture in Antiquity and the Renaissance.” Another current project, on the relations between words and images, is entitled “Mute Poetry Speaking Pictures.” He spent July of 2011 in Charlottenburg, Berlin, thinking about a possible Berlin project, which resulted in Berlin for Jews. During the Fall semester of 2011, in addition to his work at Princeton, Barkan was Visiting Professor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University.