Elizabeth Goodstein
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University, Georgia

German Transatlantic Program Fellow - Class of Fall 2007

Elizabeth Goodstein is an associate professor in Emory University’s interdisciplinary Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, where she teaches modern European thought and culture. Crossing the boundaries between intellectual history, philosophy, and literary studies, her research focuses on the ways modernity and modern subjectivity have been represented, understood, and experienced in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and German literature and culture. Goodstein received her BA in Ideas and Methods from the University of Chicago and studied at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen, before receiving her MA and PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. A former Rotary Scholar, Goodstein was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in 2002–2003. Her book Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, 2005), was awarded both the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and the German Studies Association/DAAD Book Prize.

Project Description

Georg Simmel and the Phenomenolgy of Culture

At the American Academy, Goodstein focused on writing a book tentatively titled “Georg Simmel and the Phenomenology of Culture.” Although now largely forgotten, the philosopher of culture and sociologist Georg Simmel was a highly influential thinker in his day and had a considerable impact on contemporaries including Max Weber, Georg Lukács, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Simmel also had a pathbreaking role in identifying the philosophical significance of phenomena such as gender, urban life, popular diversions, and the role of technology in society that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in modern cultural theory. Combining intellectual history with a theoretical agenda, “Georg Simmel and the Phenomenology of Culture” will demonstrate the continuing relevance of this modernist philosopher and his efforts to develop strategies of thought adequate to the challenges modern life poses for human self-understanding.

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