Christopher Wild

Before joining the Department of Germanic Studies in 2008, Christopher Wild taught at UCLA (2006-08) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1997-2004).  In the intervening years he held a visiting professorship at the University of Konstanz. Professor Wild is the author of Theater der Keuschheit - Keuschheit des Theaters. Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Rombach: Freiburg, 2003), which traces the profound historical transformation of theatricality that takes place in German theater from the Baroque to Classicism.  Furthermore, he has edited (with Helmut Puff) Zwischen den Disziplinen? Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003) and several thematic issues of Germanic Review (with Eric Downing) and Modern Language Notes (with Rüdiger Campe).  His current projects examine the ways in which theology and religion inform developments that are generally considered genuinely modern.  Most immediately, he is working on a book that asks the seemingly simple question why Descartes’ founding text of modern philosophy was titledMeditations on First Philosophy in order to take its generic affiliation seriously.  A more long-term project concerns a media history of the Reformation and is going to be collaborative - together with Helmut Puff (University of Michigan) and Ulrike Strasser (UC Irvine). In the academic year 2009-2010 Professor Wild will serve as the Williams Andrew Clark Professor at the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies of UCLA and co-organize (with Ulrike Strasser) a series of four conferences on “Cultures of Communication, Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond.”  In cooperation with Juliane Vogel (University of Konstanz) and David Levin he has just launched a multi-year research project within the Konstanz’s Excellenzcluster Cultural Foundations of Integration which seeks to develop a “Kulturelle Poetologie des Auftretens” by revisiting theater and theatricality from their constitutive operations of entry and exit.