Todd Samuel Presner
Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies
University of California Los Angeles
Email: presner@ucla.edu * Phone: (310) 794-6051 * Office: 329 Royce Hall |
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Recent Courses:
• German 59: "The Holocaust in Film and Literature" (2004, 2005, 2006)
• German 61a, "Hypermedia Berlin" (2004, 2005, 2006)
• German 112, "Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture: From the Enlightenment to High Modernism" (2005)
• German 260, "Seminar: Narrating/Visualizing Catastrophe: Sebald, Benjamin, Nossack" (2006)
• German 260, "Seminar Modern Period: German Literature, 1895-1960" (2005)
| Other Courses: |
| • Winter 2004: Graduate Seminar: War and Media Theory |
| • Spring 2004: Advanced Study of German Literature, 1890-1933 |
| • Spring 2003: Graduate Seminar: Weimar Visual Culture and Media Studies |
• Comparative Literature 225/German 215: "The Dialectics of German/Jewish Modernism" (Fall, UC-Berkeley) |
| • Comparative Literature 190, "Senior Seminar: War, Media, and the Modernist Event" (Fall, UC-Berkeley) |
Conference and Workshops:
• "After Memory? A Workshop on the Future of German-Jewish Studies" (April 18, 2005), co-sponsored by the Dept. of Germanic Languages, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the '1939' Club. • Curator of the "Distinguished Lectureship Series in Holocaust Studies" (2004-2005); visit the Center for Jewish Studies for the schedule • Co-organizer of the workshop, "Jewish Question/Muslim Question: The Burden of Assimilation in European Society, Past and Present" [pdf file] • Curator of the event and lecture series, "Bearing Witness: Jewish Culture, Memory, and Renewal in the Shadow of the Holocaust" (2003-2004) |
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Research Interests:
• German-Jewish Literature, Culture, and Intellectual History from the Enlightenment to the Present
• Visual Culture, Media Studies, and Art History
• Digital Humanities and New Media
Hypermedia Berlin is an interactive, web-based research platform and collaborative authoring environment for analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of a city space. Through a multiplicity of richly detailed, fully annotated digital maps connected together by interlinking “hotspots” at hundreds of key regions, structures, and streets over Berlin 's nearly 800 year history, the project brings the study of cultural and urban history together with the spatial analyses and modeling tools used by geographers. Hypermedia Berlin is a cross-disciplinary, technologically sophisticated mapping tool for articulating the complex history of urban transformation. It represents a template for developing new paradigms, research methodologies, and teaching tools in the emerging field of digital humanities.
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Education: |
PhD, Stanford University, Comparative Literature (2002) PhD, University of California, Berkeley, History of Art (2003) MA, Stanford University, Comparative Literature (1998) BA, Duke University, Philosophy and Literature (1994) |
Publications:
Books:
• Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 384 pp. Click here for an interview.
• Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge Curzon, 2007). 304 pp.
• Lead translator of a collection of essays by Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History/Spacing Concepts. Introduced by Hayden White. Stanford University Press, 2002. 363 pp.
Recent Articles:
•Co-editor (with Amir Eshel) of a Special Issue of Modernism/Modernity 13.4 (November 2006): "Between Spontaneity and Reflection: Reconsidering Jewish Modernism."
• "Muscle Jews and Airplanes: Modernist Mythologies, the Great War, and the Politics of Regeneration," Modernism/Modernity, 13.4 (November 2006), 701-28.
• “Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modernity of Mass Death,” Telos , no. 135 (Summer 2006): 84-108.
• “‘Hypermedia Berlin ': German Cultural Studies and New Media” (Special Issue in honor of Hinrich C. Seeba),German Politics and Society. Issue 74. Vol. 23. No. 1 (Summer 2005): 171-88.
• "'What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals': Extreme History and the Modernism of W. G. Sebald's Realism." Criticism (Summer 2004)
• "Jews on Ships; or, How Heine's Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of World History." Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA). May 2003.
• "'Clear heads, solid stomachs, and hard muscles': Max Nordau and the Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration." Modernism /modernity. April 2003 [pdf file]
• "The End of Sex and the Last Man: On the Weimar Utopia of Ernst Jünger’s ‘Worker,’" Qui Parle, Special Issue: ‘Dossier on Fascism, Gender, and Culture.’ Spring 2002.
• "Traveling Between Delos and Berlin: Heidegger and Celan on ‘What Remains,’"The German Quarterly, Special Issue, ‘Sites of Memory.’ Winter 2001.
• Co-author (with Jaime Balboa) of the report, “Proposal for a cy pres Allocation for Homosexual Victims of the Nazis” submitted on behalf of the Pink Triangle Coalition for the Swiss Banks Settlement. New York City, 2001. [pdf file]
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| Recent Grants: |
• "Digital Innovation" Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for 'Hypermedia Berlin' (2006-07).
• Center for Digital Humanities, UCLA: Faculty Grant for "Hypermedia Berlin" (2003-05)
• UCLA Faculty Career Development Award (2003)
• Bundeskanzler Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2001-02)