The Annual Bernhard Blume Lecture

Source: https://german.fas.harvard.edu/annual-bernhard-blume-lecture Parent: https://german.fas.harvard.edu/

The 2026 Blume Lecturer will be Gerhard Richter, the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. The lecture will be on Thursday, April 9, 2026; see our "Upcoming Events" for more information.

The Annual Bernhard Blume Lecture honors Bernhard Blume (1901-1978), Harvard's Kuno Francke Professor of of German Art and Culture until his retirement in 1966. Each year, the Harvard University German Department invites a scholar to foster lively discussions and provide students, faculty, and attendees with the opportunity to engage directly with leading experts in the field. By facilitating these scholarly exchanges, the series not only enhances the academic environment but also strengthens the department's commitment to promoting a deeper understanding of German culture and thought.

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9th - Eric Santner (2025) expand_more

"Ecstatic Intimacies, Intimate Ecstasies: Some Reflections on the Topologies of Modernity"

The Department presents the Ninth Annual Blume Lecture, given by Eric Santner, the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.

How is it that, as a recent author put it, capitalist modernity creates a sense that everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out? How did what Alexander Koyré characterized as the transition from the closed world to the infinite universe produce a sense of being shut in? What accounts for this uncanny convergence of open-endedness and claustrophobia? The talk will explore this topological paradox in conversation with Heidegger, Sloterdijk, Rilke, among others.

Eric Santner's work is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, and religious thought. He originally came to German Studies by way of philosophy, which he studied in Bonn (primarily Kant and Heidegger) and Freiburg (primarily Hegel and Heidegger). Other writers who have fundamentally shaped his sense of things include: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Daniel Paul Schreber, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald. Eric Santner's recent books include Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory, and (with William Mazzarella and Aaron Schuster) Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment(both University of Chicago Press).

The Blume Lecture honors Bernhard Blume (1901-1978), Harvard's Kuno Francke Professor of of German Art and Culture until his retirement in 1966.

8th - Barbara Vinken (2024) expand_more

"Fashion Queers: From Chanel to Maison Margiela"

For over a century, Western fashion has been practicing a juxtaposition of gender stereotypes and sexual desires: cross-dressing is now a fundamental structure for contemporary fashion. Its cognitive potential and its revolutionary potency lie in this harsh yet delightful discordance. The grammatical categories of “male” and “female,” shaped through the clothing regime, are juxtaposed. Clichés of femininity and masculinity are not cemented through the cross-dressing movement; they are playfully outdone. Emanating from the convention which binarity poses, cross-dressing provides more adequate descriptive possibilities than more common discourse of gender fluidity. Fashion demonstrates that gender roles are not founded in nature, do not express biology. Through queering, masculinity and femininity appear, refashioned, as societal modes of being.

Barbara Vinken received a doctoral degree from the University of Konstanz and a PhD from Yale University. She holds the chair of French and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich and is currently (spring 2024) a visiting professor in Harvard’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her main areas of research are the Italian and French Renaissance, the French novel from the 18th to the 20th century, the Italian novel of the 19th and 20th centuries, the reception of antiquity, deconstructive feminism, theories of comparative literature, and fashion theory. She writes frequently for popular media in Germany; recent scholarly publications include Eleganz (Vienna, 2023); Diva: Eine etwas andere Opernverführerin (Stuttgart, 2023); and Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond: The Roman Tradition at the Heart of the Modern (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She has been honored with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz) and the Gauß Medaiile (2024). Professor Vinken came by chance to her work on fashion, after being asked by a friend for an essay on the topic. She had always loved textiles—her mother was a designer and lived near a flourishing textile region in Germany—and living in New York City at the time gave her an ideal base for her research. Her aim was to take Fashion away from sociology and reconquer clothes for Aesthetics: read a dress like a poem, with its refined intertextuality, its marvelous retroping.

Read more here: https://www.barbaravinken.de/vita/

7th - Ernest Osterkamp (2023) expand_more

"The Poet and the 'Risches'"

Michael Beer (1800-1833), famous for a few years early in life, is one of the many forgotten poets of the 19th century. This lecture will show why it can be rewarding to dig deeper into the work of an author whose dramas are generally neglected because of their „Epigonalität.“ Beer, a German cosmopolitan, stood in close contact with the European world of theater and opera; as an author of tragedies, he was fully aware of the necessity to react in form and contents to the enormous success of opera as personified in his brother, Giacomo Meyerbeer. Michael Beer, as a German Jew, had to achieve everything he intended as a poet against the anti-Semitic resentment which in the correspondence with his family is named „Risches“. Of special interest is Beer’s drama ‚Der Paria‘ (1823) and its performance in Weimar under the direction of Goethe.

Ernst Osterkamp is professor of German literature at Humboldt University Berlin, and has held guest professorships at New York University and Washington University/St. Louis; he was a 1999-2000 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and in 2010 was the Aby Warburg Professor at the Aby Warburg Foundation in Hamburg, Germany. he is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz and of Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Since 2017 Professor Osterkamp has been President of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German academy of language and literature). He has published books on the Lucifer theme in European literature, on Goethe, Stefan George, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Felix Dahn, among others.

6th - David Wellbery (2022) expand_more

"Remarks on Literary Interpretation: On a Sentence by Kafka"

Since coming to Chicago in 2001, David Wellbery has worked intensely with colleagues in Philosophy concerned to elaborate a revised understanding of post-Kantian (Idealist) thought. This collaboration eventuated in an ambitious Neubauer Collegium Project entitled Self-Determining Form. As co-editor of the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, he closely follows developments in German scholarship and regularly organize scholarly events in Germany. His current research bears on the great literary figures of the Idealist period – Goethe centrally, but also Schiller, Hölderlin, the Romantics – and the interlacing of their work with the philosophical projects of their contemporaries. Prizes include the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prize of the DAAD, the Gold-Medal awarded by the Goethe Gesellschaft in Weimar, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Konstanz.

5th - Gabriele Brandstetter (2021) expand_more

"Movement and Metaphor in Anne Juren's Fantastical Anatomies"

Gabriele Brandstetter is Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and since 2008 co-director of the International Research Centre “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” Her research focus is on the history and aesthetics of dance from the 18th century until today, theatre and dance of the avant-garde; contemporary theatre and dance, performance, theatricality and gender differences; concepts of body, movement and image.

(Postponed to March 2022)

4th - Jochen Hörisch (2019) expand_more

"Hand in Hand—Goethes Leitmotiv"

Jochen Hörisch was born in Bad Oldesloe in 1951. He has been married since 1975 and has three children (Hannah born in 1980, Felix in 1983, and Jacob in 1987). From 1970 to 1976, he studied German, philosophy, and history in Düsseldorf, Paris, and Heidelberg. After receiving his doctorate, he worked as an assistant professor from 1976 to 1988, and after completing his habilitation (1982), he was a private lecturer and professor (C 2) at the University of Düsseldorf. From 1988 to 2018, he was a full professor of modern German and media analysis at the University of Mannheim, and from 2018, he was a senior professor. In 2000, he accepted a professorship at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (USA) and a chair for media theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He declined an offer to study at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (USA) and a chair for media theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2002).

3rd - Leslie Adelson (2018) expand_more

"Alexander Kluge's 'Saturday in Utopia' - Making Time for Other Lives with Critical Theory and Narrative Form"

Professor Adelson’s teaching and research concentrate on German literature from 1945 to the present and additionally reflect interdisciplinary as well as transnational approaches to culture and history. Her focal interests include German literature of the post-war and post-socialist eras, emergent literatures often associated with minority and migrant populations (especially regarding Jews, Turks, and Black Germans), and postcolonial theories of difference and approximation. Additional research and teaching projects revolve around futurity and experiments in narrative form in German literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in the prose miniatures of Alexander Kluge and narrative writing by so-called minority authors. Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies Emerita, Adelson previously chaired the Department of German Studies for nine years and directed Cornell’s interdisciplinary Institute for German Cultural Studies for seven. She belongs to Cornell University’s graduate fields in German Studies, Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies, as well as Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. She additionally serves on advisory boards for several book series, including the Stauffenburg Verlag's Discussion Series on Inter- und Multikultur, the Stauffenburg Verlag's Studies in Contemporary German Literature, and Cornell University Press’s Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought. A member of the international advisory board for the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch since its inception in 2014 and a contributing editor for New German Critique from 1983 to 2020, she additionally served on the editorial board for New German Critique from 2020 through 2023. She regularly assists many other presses, journals, and research organizations with scholarly evaluations as well. In 2020 she was one of two senior scholars to be awarded the international Preis der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik 2019.

2nd - Juliane Vogel (2017) expand_more

"Entrance as Crisis in Tragic Drama"

Juliane Vogel is Professor of Modern German Literature and General Literature, specializing in literature from the 18th century to the present, at the University of Konstanz. She completed her studies (German and English) at the University of Vienna. Visiting professorships have taken her to Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and New York University, and she has held research stays at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Vienna, UC Berkeley, the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Konstanz (2010/2011), the Research Center for Image Evidence at the Free University of Berlin (2018/2019). In 2020, she was awarded the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG). She is spokesperson for the research project "Traveling Forms," funded by the Nomis Foundation, which examines the migration of aesthetic and social forms in the past and present. She is also head of the Research Center for Form Theory and Historical Poetics, also at the University of Konstanz. Her research focuses on European drama, the foundations and basic concepts of European dramaturgy, form and historical poetics, experimental writing styles of modernism, and Austrian literature. She is currently preparing a book on editing in modernist literature and art. Juliane Vogel is co-editor of the German Quarterly for Literary Studies and Intellectual History, a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study in German Literature) and the Academic Advisory Board of the Center for Literary Research in Berlin.

1st - Russell Berman (2016) expand_more

"Representing the Trial: Judith Butler Reads Hannah Arendt Reading Adolf Eichmann"

Professor Berman joined the Stanford faculty in 1979. He was awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Berlin, and in 1997 the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany. He has directed several National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College Teachers, and he is now a member of the National Humanities Council. At Stanford, he has served in several administrative offices, including Chair of German Studies, Director of the Overseas Studies Program, and Director of Stanford Introductory Studies. In 2011 he served as President of the Modern Language Association. Professor Berman is the editor emeritus of the quarterly journal Telos. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department. He is currently the Faculty Director of Comparative Literature at Stanford and Director of the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World at the Hoover Institution.