Humanities Center Public Lecture Series: Paul Fleming

Paul Fleming is the L. Sanford and Jo Mills Reis Professor of Humanities and the former Taylor Family Director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities (2017-2024).

As Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies, he has published the monographs Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2009) and The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (2006) along with edited volumes on Hans Blumenberg, Siegfried Kracauer, the scholars around Stefan George, and Ulrich Peltzer. He has translated Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic (2002) and Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River (2010) as well as co-translated Blumenberg’s The Saint Matthew Passion (2022).

He edits the book series “Signale” in Cormell University Press, co-edits the journal New German Critique, and serves on the boards of diacritics and the book series Paradigms: Literature & the Human Sciences in de Gruyter Press.

Fleming has published widely on close reading, distant reading, gestures in text, precarity and the new life on the road, dilettantism, notions of humor, Critical Theory, and much more. Recent graduate seminars include “Critical Theory and American Black and Queer Thought,” “Prophetic Realisms: Literature and the Shape of Things to Come,” and “Writing Revolution 1830-1848.” In general, his teaching covers eighteenth and nineteenth century German and European literature, especially the novel; aesthetics and hermeneutics from 1750 to the present; and Critical Theory.