Faculty Page

Karin Schutjer joined the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics in the fall of 1998.  She received her BA in Humanities from Yale and her PhD in German from Princeton. Her education also included university study in Berlin and Tübingen. She teaches a wide range of courses within the program from Intermediate German to advanced seminars on, for example,  "Goethe's Faust and the Problem of Evil."

Schutjer's research interests concern broadly the intersections of philosophy, literature and social thought in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Germany.  Her book, Narrating Community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin (Wayne State U.P., 2001) considers conceptions of individual and collective identity in the intellectually and politically tumultuous 1790's. Her current book project, Goethe’s Wanderers and the Wandering Jews: Identity, Idolatry, Modernity, addresses J.W. Goethe's complex and often contradictory relationship to Judaism. A related article, "Beyond the Wandering Jew: Anti-Semitism and Narrative Supercession in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre" German Quarterly 77.4 received both the Max Kade Prize for the best article in German Quarterly 2004 and the Goethe Society of North America, Essay Prize for 2004. She was also the recent recipient of National Humanities Center/NEH Fellowship in Research Triangle Park, NC (2004-5) and Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for research in Leipzig, Germany (2007-8).   She has served on the Executive Committee for the Division on Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century German Literature of the Modern Languages Association and as a "Director-at-Large"of the Goethe Society of North America.