Richard Langston

Richard Langston
Departmental Chair; Professor of German

Education

2002, Ph.D., Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis

Intellectual Biography & Awards

My scholarship focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and its relationship to visual culture and philosophy. I have published widely on German-language prose, poetry, avant-garde and experimental cinema, as well as the visual arts. Much of my recent scholarship has focused primarily on the work of author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt. I am currently writing a monograph on imagined histories of sex and sociability in West German gay prose and poetry. In 2011-2012 I was a fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and from 2014-2018 I was appointed the Zachary Smith Distinguished Term Chair in Teaching and Research.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Books

Sex und Soziabilität: Schwule Poetik in den 1980er Jahren.
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 2024.

Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Vol. 9: Crisis and Astonishment.
Ed. R. Langston & I. Simova. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2024.

“Kluge’s Marxism: On Zeppelins and Other Useless Technologies.” In: Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Vol. 9: Crisis and Astonishment. Eds. R. Langston & I. Simova. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2024. 143-150.

“Three Interviews on Artificial Intelligence.“ Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Vol. 9: Crisis and Astonishment. Ed. R. Langston and I. Simova. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2024. 119-135.

The Patriot
Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021.

Dark Matter: A Guide to Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt
London & New York: Verso Books, 2020.

Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader
Ed. Richard Langston. Trans. Emma Woelk et al. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2019.

• “Marking Time after Utopia.” At the End of Neoliberalism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary German Film. Eds. Claudia Breger and Olivia Landry. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2024. 120-141.
• “The Spiritual Communism of Cruising: Theatricality and the Spectacle of AIDS in Hubert Fichte’s Roman Fleuve.” Colloquia Germanica 55.3-4 (July 2023). 278-305.
• “Marxist and Formless: Uncanny Materialism in Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance.” New German Critique 49.3 (Nov. 2022): 113-133.

Frequently Taught Courses

• GERM 60: Avant-Garde Cinema: History, Themes, Textures (FYS)
• GSLL 259: Ideology and Aesthetics: Marxism and Literature (Seminar)
• GERM 281: The German Idea of War (Lecture)
• GERM 301-302: Advanced German I & II (Seminar)
• GERM 303: Introduction to German Literature (Seminar)
• GERM 475: Different than the Others: Stories of Queer German Liberation, 1864-2021 (Seminar)
• GERM 560: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Twentieth-Century German Philosophy and Modern Youth Cultures (Lecture)

Undergraduate and Graduate Advising and Mentoring

• Merlin Ganzevoort – “On the Contemporary Return of Modernism’s Cannibals, Nomads and Human Insects” (In Progress)
• Stephen Zaksewics, Ph.D. ‘24 – “The Ends of the World: Figures of Planetarity in Contemporary Austrian Prose” (Dissertation)
• Leonie Wilms, Ph.D. ‘24 – “Writing Hate/Performing Hate: Embodied Affect in Contemporary German Theater” (Dissertation)
• N.D. Jones, Ph.D. ‘23 – “Revolution and the City: Marxist Anthropologies in the Interwar Realist Novel” (Dissertation)
• Christoph Schmitz, Ph.D. ’22 – “Listening to Novels: Index and Voice in Post-War German Fiction” (Dissertation)
• Benjamin Davis, B.A. ’21 – “100 Years Berlin Alexanderplatz: Disability, Gender and Race in Döblin, Fassbinder and Qurbani” (Honors Thesis)
• Claire Staresinic, B.A. ’21 – “Homeopathy, Gender and Agency in German Romanticism: The Case of Bettina von Arnim and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff” (Honors Thesis)
• Richard Lambert, III, Ph.D. ’17 – “In Search of Experience: Viennese Modernism’s Literary Experiments” (Dissertation)
• Nate Wagner, B.A., ’17. “Cynicism or Revolt: Searching for the Political between Contemporary German Bildungsromane and Post-Wall Popular Music” (Honors Thesis)
• Amelia Wallace, B.A., ’16 – “Ulrike Meinhof’s Bambule: Performing Politics in the Electronic Public Sphere” (Honors Thesis)
• Andreas Hill, B.A., ’16 – “The Time and Space of Stimmung: Poetic Negotiations of Modernity in Hölderlin and Rilke” (Honors Thesis)
• Nicole Johnson, B.A., ’14 – “Deconstructing the Masculine Wall: Exploring Gendered Experiences of German Reunification in Film and Autobiography” (Honors Thesis)
• Alexander Fulk Kirkland, Ph.D., ’13 – “Literature as Utopia: Spaces of Alterity in West German Postcolonial and Science-Fiction Literature after Sixty-Eight” (Dissertation)
• Kai-Uwe Werbeck, Ph.D., ’12 – “From Rubble to Revolutions and Raves : Literary Interrogations of German Media Ecologies” (Dissertation)
• Robert Blankenship, Ph.D., ’11 – “Transforming Suicides: Literary Heritage, Intertextuality, and Self-Annihilation in GDR Fiction of the 1970s and 1980s” (Dissertation)
• Rebeccah Dawson, Ph.D., ’11 – “‘Sport ist der Nerv der Zeit’: The Politics of Sport in German Literature, 1918-1962” (Dissertation)
• Anja Wieden, Ph.D., ’11 – “Female Experiences of Rape and Hunger in Postwar German Literature, 1945-1960” (Dissertation)
• Cyrus Shahan, Ph.D., ’08 – “Punk Poetics and West German Literature of the Eighties” (Dissertation)
• David Palmer, B.A., ’04 – “Persecution & Propaganda: The Monstrous ‘Other’ in German Cinema” (Honors Thesis)

Additional Information

Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch (The Yearbook’s English-Language Site)

For more about Dr. Langston, see his Curriculum Vitae.