Todd Kontje

Ph.D. (Princeton)

Office Hours

After teaching for several decades in the Literature Department I retired effective July 2024, although I will continue to teach on a limited basis for the department over the next three years and am scheduled to lead a Global Seminar in Berlin in the summer of 2025.

I received my PhD in German literature from Princeton University after having studied English and German at the University of Oregon. I taught at Columbia University for several years before moving to UC San Diego, where I have taught a wide range of courses on German and other European literatures, critical theory, and Revelle College’s Humanities program.

My earlier publications focused on the history of the German Bildungsroman and German women writers. I then turned toward questions of empire and German relations with the non-European world. German Orientalisms offers a broad historical overview of the ways in which Germany has defined itself in relation to the East (real or imagined) and in the process set itself off from other Western European nations. Thomas Mann’s World traces the interrelated themes of racial difference and the “Jewish question” in the work of this self-proclaimed representative of the German nation. Imperial Fictions explores how German-language writers from the early Middle Ages to the present imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. Georg Forster: German Cosmopolitan offers a fresh look at the fascinating life and work of a world traveler, political activist, and cosmopolitan visionary. I am proud that this study was distinguished with the award for best book in the fields of literary and cultural studies by the German Studies Association in 2023.

My newest book, Global Germany Circa 1800: A Revisionist Literary History, will appear in the Max Kade Research Institute Series, Germans Beyond Europe, published by Pennsylvania State University Press. This study asks two interrelated questions: in what ways did Germans participate in the European conquest of the world, and how did they differ from other imperial powers? What is the relation, in other words, between the German form of empire, the old Reich, and the modern European empires that emerged in the global age? This study complements the work of recent scholars who have argued for a decentering of the nation-state in accounts of German history and a reexamination of Germany’s colonial past. It focuses on the pivotal era around 1800, when many of the concepts that define the modern era first came into being. These include the modern nation-state and its attendant belief in the monolingual paradigm, the sense that history is unfolding at an accelerating pace toward an uncertain future, the awareness that events in Europe have a growing impact on global affairs, and that human beings share the planet with other species enmeshed in fragile ecosystems. Global Germany Circa 1800’s focus on the resistance to European imperialism, coupled with visions of a world order that could tolerate regional autonomy and celebrate cultural difference, suggests surprising affinities with today’s efforts to decolonize German Studies. German artists and intellectuals around 1800 are not only the ancestors of the enemies of today’s decolonial thinkers, but also their forgotten allies.

Global Germany Circa 1800: A Revisionist Literary History. The Max Kade Research Institute Series: Germans Beyond Europe. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, forthcoming 2025.

Georg Forster: German Cosmopolitan. Series: Germans Beyond Europe. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.

Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2018.

Thomas Mann's World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2011.

The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

German Orientalisms. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

A Companion to German Realism (editor, introduction). Camden House Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2002.

Women, the Novel, and the German Nation 1771-1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre. Literary Criticism in Perspective. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1993.

Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German 'Bildungsroman' as Metafiction. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1992.