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Gerhard Richter Professor of German Ph.D., Princeton University, 1996 Email: grichter@ucdavis.edu Office: 404 Sproul Office Hours

Professor Richter, who holds degrees in German and Comparative Literature, received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996. His research and teaching focus on modern German literature, culture, and thought; literary and cultural theory; technologies of representation; the history and politics of aesthetic theory; literature and philosophy; intellectual history (18th to 21st centuries); Frankfurt School and French thought.

Professor Richter is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000, 2nd edition 2002); Ästhetik des Ereignisses. Sprache-Geschichte-Medium (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), and Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). He is the editor of Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Rereading Adorno, Special Issue of Monatshefte 94: 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity (forthcoming), and co-editor of Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Professor Richter also has published numerous articles and book chapters in such venues as New German Critique, The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, The German Quarterly, Journal of Visual Culture, qui parle, and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. He currently is at work on a book-length study that examines the concept of "afterness" in modern thought and aesthetics. The chapters are grouped around writers such as Hõlderlin, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Bloch, Adorno, Lyotard, and Derrida. Professor Richter presented parts of this research in a series of lectures and seminars in the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo in fall 2006.

An award-winning teacher, he offers undergraduate courses on such topics as "The Writing of the Disaster: Representations of the Holocaust in Germany and the US," "Literature and Photography," and "What Is Enlightenment? Readings in German Intellectual History." Recent graduate seminars include "Walter Benjamin: Aesthetics, Media, Modernity," "Heidegger and Lyric Poetry," "What Is Art? Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Adorno," "Of Friends and Enemies," "Frankfurt School Critical Theory," and "Europe - The Very Idea." In addition to his teaching in the Department of German, Professor Richter regularly offers courses in the Graduate Program in Critical Theory, on whose executive committee he serves. He also is affiliated with Comparative Literature.

Before joining the faculty at the University of California in fall 2005, Professor Richter served as an assistant and tenured associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1996-2005), where he co-directed an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Workshop for faculty and graduate students on "Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity" at the Center for the Humanities. He has been invited to conduct guest seminars at institutions such as NYU and Cornell University. Professor Richter also was a visiting scholar at the Universität zu Kõln (Cologne, Germany) during the spring semester 2004. He recently conducted research at the University of Bonn (Germany) as a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.