John T. Hamilton

William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature

John Hamilton studied Comparative Literature, German, and Classics in New York, Paris, and Heidelberg. He has held previous teaching positions in Comparative Literature and German at New York University, with visiting professorships in Classics at the University of California-Santa Cruz and at Bristol University's Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition. Since 1995, he has been actively involved with the Leibniz-Kreis, a working group originally based in Heidelberg devoted to the "Nachleben der Antike." In 2005-2006 he was resident fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and in 2011 visiting scholar at Berlin’s Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. He is actively involved with the American Academy in Berlin and the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

Teaching and Research topics include 18th- and 19th-century Literature, Classical Philology and Reception History, Music and Literature, Literary Theory and Political Metaphorology. In addition to his monographs, he has published over a hundred articles, including work on Lessing, Goethe, Hölderlin, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Büchner, Heine, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Benjamin, Heidegger, Celan, Böll, and Uwe Timm; Homer, Pindar, Cicero, Horace, and Ovid; Balzac, Gautier, Proust, Valéry, Roger Caillois, and Pascal Quignard.

Complacency Large Complacency can be ordered at The University of Chicago Press