Paul Reitter
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University

John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Spring 2018

Paul Reitter is Professor in German Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. He completed his BA in history at Haverford College and PhD in German studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Reitter is the author of Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton, 2012), and The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (Chicago, 2008). He collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

 

Together with Louis Menand and Chad Wellmon, Reitter edited The Rise of the Modern University (Chicago, 2016), an anthology of sources about the mission of the research university. Reitter and Wellmon also edited Anti-Education (New York Review Books Classics, 2015), a new translation of Nietzsche’s lectures on the German educational system. Reitter has published regularly in the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Nation.

Project Description

Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in an Age of Disenchantment

In his Academy book project, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in an Age of Disenchantment (under contract with Chicago), Reitter will reconstruct several crises of the humanities in nineteenth-century Germany; the archival holdings of the Humboldt Universität are key to his research. Reitter plans to use the prism of historical accounts to better understand present-day crises in the humanities in the United States and elsewhere. Building on recent attempts to reconsider the relationship between the emergence of modern academic institutions, ideals, and practices, and larger processes of modernization, Reitter examines the interaction between the humanities and developments such as bureaucratic rationalization, secularization, and democratization. Reitter and his co-author, Chad Wellmon, have found that these processes have both allowed for the rise and institutionalization of modern conceptions of the humanities and, at the same time, created historically specific pressures under which humanists continue to operate.

Academy Activities

15 May 18
The Humanities in an Age of Disenchantment Humanities

John P. Birkelund Lecture

The Humanities in an Age of Disenchantment

Historian Paul Reitter explores the emergence of the German idea of “the humanities in crisis,” its historical causes and dissemination, and its presence in the fraught discussion of the humanities today.

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15 Mar 18

Fellow Spotlight: Paul Reitter

Paul Reitter is Professor in German Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. Reitter is the author of Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton, 2012), and The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Je ...

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