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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.

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