![Todd Kontje Todd Kontje](../_images/tkontje.jpg)
- tkontje@ucsd.edu
-
6th College Bldg 1/Ridge Walk
Room 240
Mail Code: 0410
Professor
Ph.D. (Princeton)
Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Distinguished Professor
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. I teach undergraduate courses in German and European literature and the occasional graduate seminar in critical theory and eighteenth-century Literature.
Although I have written on a wide variety of authors, my work has increasingly focused 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, with particular attention to the symbolic geography in his literary works. Imperial Fictions explores how German-language writers from the early Middle Ages to the present imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. My new book finally, offers a fresh look at the life and work of Georg Forster (1754-1794), whom Friedrich Schlegel hailed as “a genuine cosmopolitan of German origins” (ein echter Weltbürger, deutscher Herkunft). As a participant in Captain Cook’s second voyage and one of the leading figures in the Mainz Republic, Forster was a cosmopolitan thinker who had traveled the world and a political activist in a revolutionary age. A recent article on Alexander von Humboldt’s Views of Nature (German Studies Review) continues this focus on Germany in global context and represents an early stage of a new project, tentatively titled Weimar in the World: Germany in the Global Eighteenth Century.