Jeffrey Wallen is professor of comparative literature, and was Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (HACU) from 2012-15 .
He has also taught as a visiting professor at the Free University Berlin and at the University of Toulouse, and has been the director of Hampshire’s semester-long study abroad program. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature; on biography and literary portraiture; on testimony, Holocaust literature, and Berlin Jewish history; and on debates about education. His book Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture was published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Some of his most recent publications are “Au Seuil, entre la vie et la morte” (in Traces de vie à Auschwitz: Un Manuscript clandestin), “Facing the Sonderkommando: Son of Saul and the Dynamics of Witnessing,” “Circuitous Journeys: The Migration of Objects and the Trusteeship of Memory ,” “The Witness Against the Archive: Towards a Microhistory of Christianstadt,” “Beckett in Time of Crisis,” “Testimony and Taboo: The Perverse Writings of Ka-Tzetnik 135633,” “The Lure of the Archive: The Atlas Projects of Walid Raad,” “Migrant Visions: The Scheunenviertel and Boyle Heights, Los Angeles,” “Twemlow’s Abyss,” “Narrative Tensions: The Eyewitness and the Archive,” “Falling Under an Evil Influence,” “The Death and Discontents of Theory,” and “Sociable Robots und das Posthumane.” He is currently working on a study of the archive in contemporary thought and art.
His teaching interests include 19th- and 20th-century comparative literature (German, French, British), critical theory, Holocaust Studies, Victorian Studies, Modernism, and Jewish Studies.
Contact
Emily Dickinson Hall 10
Mail Code: HA
Hampshire College
893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002
413.559.5428
jwallen@hampshire.edu