Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor EMERITUS of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). He chaired the Department of Germanic Languages from 1986-1992 and again from 2005-2008. He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique (1974-), and he serves on the editorial boards of October, Constellations, Germanic Review, Transit, Key Words (UK), Critical Space (Tokyo), Memory Studies (UK), Lumina (Brazil), Comunicação & Cultura (Portugal). In 2005, he won Columbia’s coveted Mark van Doren teaching award. His research and teaching focus on 18th-20th-century German literature and culture, international modernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, postmodernism, cultural memory of historical trauma in transnational contexts, CONTEMPORARY ART, and urban culture and globalization.
Huyssen has published widely in German and English and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Swedish, Danish, Slovenian, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, and Chinese. His books include Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung. Studien zur frühromantischen Utopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur (1969), Friedrich Schlegel. “Athenäums”-Fragmente und andere Schriften (1978, latest reprint 2005), Drama des Sturm und Drang (1980), The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions (ed. with Teresa de Lauretis and Kathleen Woodward, 1980), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (ed. with Klaus Scherpe, 1986), Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (ed. with David Bathrick, 1989), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), the edited volume on the culture of non-Western cities entitled Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (2008), Modernismo después de la posmodernidad (2010), William Kentridge and Nalini Malani: The Shadowplay as Medium of Memory (2013), and Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (2015).
Retired since 2017, he is currently working on a book about memory of state violence and historical trauma in contemporary art from beyond the Northern Transatlantic and a series of essays about 21st-century fascism.
Recent Essays
”Mustang Red: My American Road to Critical Theory,” Transatlantic German Studies: Testimonies to the Profession, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler and Peter Höyng (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2018) 124 -143.
“Palimpsesto: Writing in Water and in Light,” White Cube catalogue for Doris Salcedo show (Musumeci: Italy, 2018)4-11.
“Breitbart, Bannon, Trump and the Frankfurt School: A Strange Meeting of Minds,” September 29, 2017. http://www.publicseminar.org/author/ahuyssen/
“Behemoth Rises Again,” https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/behemoth-rises-again/
