Life and development
From 1963 to 1967 he studied philosophy, English and French literature and language at Würzburg University to which he added German literature after his first state exam in 1967 (second state exam in 1969). Again at Würzburg University in 1973, he took his PhD with a dissertation on the problems of literary interpretation, adopting and adapting perspectives of the theory of language and philosophy of science. In 1977, he took his Habilitation at Konstanz University with a book written from the point of view of a theory of consciousness, on the functional history of the 19th century English novel, especially the novels of George Meredith. Pfeiffer’s scholarly development is marked by the adjustment and relocation of literary studies in broader media and cultural contexts. These, in turn, are re-examined in anthropological terms.
In 1978, he became Professor of English at the Ruhr University Bochum, and in 1979 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Siegen (Professor Emeritus as of 2009). Since 2007 he has been at Jacobs University Bremen (Professor Emeritus as of end of 2011). As (distinguished) visiting professor and Fellow he has taught and pursued research at US-American (amongst others Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of California at Irvine and Santa Cruz), Japanese, Brazilian and German universities.
Hans Robert Jauss was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory and medieval and modern French literature. His approach was derived from the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.
David E. Wellbery is an American professor of German Studies at the University of Chicago. As of 2022 he is the chair of the department of Germanic Studies and holds the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professorship in the department. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Hans Ulrich "Sepp" Gumbrecht is a literary theorist whose work spans philology, philosophy, semiotics, literary and cultural history, and epistemologies of the everyday. As of June 14, 2018, he is Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature at Stanford University. Since 1989, he held the Albert Guérard Chair as Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian in Stanford's Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. By courtesy, he was also affiliated with the Departments of German Studies, Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Since retirement, he continues to be a Catedratico Visitante Permanente at the University of Lisbon and became a Presidential Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020.
Dieter Borchmeyer is a German literary critic.
Peter von Matt is a Swiss philologist and author.
Heinz Schlaffer was a German Germanist and Professor of Literary Science of the University of Stuttgart. He was best known for essays like "Die kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur".
Anselm Haverkamp is a German-American professor of literature and philosophy.
Paul Michael Lutzeler is a German-American scholar of German studies and comparative literature. He is the Rosa May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.
Winfried Fluck studied German, English and American literature at Freie Universität Berlin, Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1972, he got his doctoral degree from Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on aesthetic premises in the literary criticism of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For his Habilitation, the European qualification for a professorship, he wrote a study on American realism as a form of “staged reality” (Inszenierte Wirklichkeit). After visiting scholarships at Harvard and Yale University, he got his first appointment as a professor at the University of Constance in Germany before he became Professor and Chair of North American Culture at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Winfried Fluck taught as a guest professor at Princeton University and the Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, and he was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, the Advanced Studies Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and the Internationales Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum in Vienna. From 2005-2008, he was chair of the Research Reviewing Committee of the German Research Council on the humanities. He is a founding member of the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Universities Excellence Initiative, and is directing it together with Ulla Haselstein. He is also co-director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College established and directed by Donald E. Pease.
Aleida Assmann is a German professor of English and Literary Studies, who studied Egyptology and whose work has focused on Cultural Anthropology and Cultural and Communicative Memory.
Wolfgang Brezinka was a German-Austrian educational scientist. He served as Professor of Pedagogy at the School of education of the University of Würzburg, as well as at the Universities of Innsbruck and Konstanz.
Helga W. Kraft, is a German-American Professor of Germanic Studies, Emerita.
George Guțu is a Romanian philologist, teacher in the Department of German Language and Literature of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest. He is also director of the Paul Celan Center for Research and Excellence and the Master programme "Intercultural Literary and Linguistic Communication Strategies", initiated by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures together with other departments of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. His academic activity is based on the history of German literature ; German and Austrian contemporary literature; German literature from Romania, cultural inter-referentiality in Central and Southeast Europe, particularly in Bukovina, poetics, literary theory, translation, the history of German studies and guidance for PhD students. His research domains are the history of German literature; comparative literature; German literature from Romania; cultural inter-referentiality; imagology; the history and aesthetics of reception; theory and practice of translation.
Markus Fischer is a German author of multiple books, as well as a contributor to various volumes He is professor at the faculty of foreign languages and literatures at the University of Bucharest.
Anne Fuchs, is an academic specialist on modern and post-war German literature and Culture.
Fang Weigui is a Chinese comparative literature scholar, sinologist, and literary translator.
Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf is a Senior Professor at the University of Münster, Germany. She was a Professor of German Literature at the University of Münster, and held a chair in German Literary History with special focus on Modernity and Contemporary Literature. Her fields of research include Autobiography/Autofiction, Literary Theory, Rhetoric, Literary and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and the relation of Religion, Politics and Literature.
Helmut Birkhan is an Austrian philologist who is Professor Emeritus of Ancient German Language and Literature and the former Managing Director of the Institute for Germanic Studies at the University of Vienna.
Peter Václav Zima is a literary critic and a social scientist born in Prague 1946. He is of Czech-German origin and has dual nationality such as Austrian and Dutch. He is emeritus professor of the Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt (Austria) where he held the chair of General and Comparative Literature from 1983 to 2012.
Rüdiger Campe is a German literary scholar of modern German literature whose research focuses on rhetoric, aesthetics, history of science, and literary history and theory. He is currently the Alfred C. and Martha F. Mohr Professor of German and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award and the Aby Warburg Prize.
