John T. Hamilton

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" and is co-editor of Metaforms: Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity (Brill). Resident fellowships include: the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2005-2006), the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin (2011), and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (2023-2024).  

Teaching and Research topics cover 18th- and 19th-century Literature, Classical Philology and Reception History, Music and Literature, Literary Theory and Political Metaphorology. In addition to eight 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. His current book-length project is entitled Culture & Convenience. 

Selected Publications

Without Within: Parenthetic Interferences in Reception History (2025)

France/Kafka: An Author in Theory (2023)

Complacency - Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education (2022)

Über die Selbstgefälligkeit (2021)

Philology of the Flesh (2018)

Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (2013)

Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (2008)

Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity and the Classical Tradition (2004)