Peter C. Caldwell is Samuel G. McCann Professor of History at Rice University. His publications have focused on German political thought from 1848 to the present, including Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), and Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), on Ludwig Feuerbach and political radicalism in Germany.
Rodrigo Chacón is a lecturer on social studies at Harvard University. He received his PhD in political philosophy from The New School for Social Research in 2010. Previously, he taught political theory at Eugene Lang College,theTechnische Universität Dresden, and Boston College, where he also conducted post-doctoral research as a Jack Miller-Veritas Fund Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2009–2010. He is the author of “Reading Strauss From the Start: On the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy’” (European Journal of Political Theory, 2010: 3) and is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled German Sokrates: Heidegger, Arendt, Strauss, and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, 1921–1958.
Christophe Chalamet is assistant professor in the Department of Theology at Fordham University. He holds a M.Div. and PhD in historical theology from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His primary research interest is the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental Protestant theology, focusing on the work of Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Albrecht Ritschl. In his book, Dialectical Theologians (2005), Chalamet suggests that Wilhelm Herrmann (Bultmann and Barth’s teacher) was a decisive figure in the formation of the so-called “dialectical school” of theology in the 1920s and beyond. He also shows how the use of dialectical tensions impacted the debate between Barth and Bultmann and how their differing programs were at the service of theological intentions, which were in fact much more similar than they realized. One of their basic intentions was to preserve the mystery of God’s revelation, or God’s concealment in his self-disclosure. Professor Chalamet’s next project is to study the Ritschlian school of theology and the split within that school between the younger generation of Ritschlian scholars and their program of a science of religion and the more confessional—or confessing—theologians. In Fall 2011 he will begin teaching systematic theology at the University of Geneva.
Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University and teaches part time as the Paul E. Raither Distinguished Scholar at the University of Chicago. He is the author of 14 books and approximately 250 articles that range across the fields of ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics, and history. His books include acclaimed works on economic democracy, social/ethical theory, theories of myth and interpretation, Barthian neoorthodoxy, and neoconservative politics.
Professor Dorrien’s work, Social Ethics in the Making (2009), a comprehensive interpretation of social ethics as an academic field and a tradition of public discourse, has received wide acclaim. A frequent lecturer at universities, conferences, civic groups, and religious communities, Professor Dorrien is a recent past president of the American Theological Society and has a long record of involvement in social justice organizations. His book, Imperial Designs, grew out of his extensive lecturing against the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq. His most recent book, Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice, features his recent lectures on economic democracy, racial and gender justice, and anti-imperial politics. He is currently writing a book on Kant, Hegel, and the impact of philosophical idealism on religious thought.
Robert Gibbs is inaugural director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His current work is located on the borderlines of philosophy and religion, with a comparative and historical focus on law and ethics. He has worked on ethics in relation to the modern Jewish philosophical tradition and has numerous publications in this and in related fields in continental philosophy including two books, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas and Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities. He has taught in the philosophy departments at the University of Toronto and St. Louis University and in the religion departments at Princeton University and (affiliated) at the University of Toronto. He is cross-appointed to the University of Toronto departments of French, German, Religion, and the Centre for Jewish Studies.
He has had research grants for projects on messianic epistemology and the rule of law, and his current research grant supports a project on “Reason and Authority: Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning.” This interdisciplinary work has led to collaboration with various other humanities departments, as well as with the faculty of law. He is vice president of the International Rosenzweig Society and serves on various academic advisory boards and journal editorial boards. He is a member of the advisoryboard of CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes), a member of the Humanities Initiative Steering Committee for CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) and is engaged in the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) program for partnerships of CHCI with centerNet. During the period of January-June 2011, Professor Gibbs was Polonsky Research Visiting Fellow with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, University of Cambridge.
Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (The University of California Press, 2003), which received The Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for Best Book in Intellectual History. Most recently he is the author of Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010). He also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007) and The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory in Honor of Martin Jay (Berghahn, 2008), and he has recently completed a co-edited volume, Weimar Thought (Princeton, forthcoming). At Harvard he has a permanent seat on the Standing Committee for Degrees in Social Studies and is also faculty affiliate at the Center for European Studies, where he serves as chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History. A graduate of Reed College (BA, 1988) and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD, 1997), Gordon was a visiting fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University from 1998 to 2000. In the autumn of 2000, he joined the Harvard faculty. In 2005, he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Udi Greenberg is an assistant professor of German and intellectual history at Dartmouth College. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has also studied at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California at Berkeley. He has published several articles on European intellectual history, political theory, and film, and currently he is working on a project entitled “Cold War Weimar,” which traces the intellectual origins of the Cold War to Central European theories developed during the Weimar years.
Jeffrey Herf is a professor at the University of Maryland who studies the intersection of ideas and politics in modern European history, specializing in twentieth-century Germany. He has published extensively on Germany during the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and West and East Germany during the Cold War. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard, 2006) offers a new look at the Nazi regime’s translation of radical anti-Semitism into the conspiracy theory that shaped its public narrative of World War II and its equally public defense of a policy of “exterminating” Europe’s Jews. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984) examined the simultaneous embrace of modern technology and rejection of liberal modernity by right-wing intellectuals. The work became a standard work and has been published in Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish translations. War By Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles (Free Press, 1991) examined the connection between changing political culture within West Germany and the dispute over nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance during the 1980s. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard, 1997) traced the varieties of memory and avoidance about the Holocaust offered by West and East German political figures from the 1940s through the 1990s. It was one of the first works to make extensive use of the then recently opened East German Communist Party and government archives. It was a co-winner of the Fraenkel Prize of the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library in London in 1996. In 1998 it received the George Lewis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. Jeffrey Herf has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Herf has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and received a variety of distinguished research fellowships. He is a member of the editorial board of Central European History, and The Journal of Israeli History, was a Contributing Editor to Partisan Review and has contributed articles, reviews and essays to The New Republic (print and online editions), Internationale Politik, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit, The National Interest, and The Washington Post. He is the convener of the European Caucus and of the European Workshop seminar in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, which he joined in 2000 after teaching at Ohio University in Athens, Emory, Holy Cross, and Harvard. In Fall 2007 he was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Michael Hollerich is professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas. He has been a member of the Theology Department since 1993. At St. Thomas he has taught the department’s introductory theology course as well as specialized courses in all periods of church history at both the undergraduate and graduate level. His academic publications are primarily in the early Christian period, with a secondary interest in modern German church history. His research and teaching expertise includes religion and politics and the history of biblical interpretation. His most recent publications are his contribution, along with Robert Wilken and Angela Christman, to the Isaiah volume of The Church’s Bible (Eerdmans, 2007), a collection of patristic exegetical texts on the book of Isaiah, and an article, “The Anti-Secular Front Revisited: Catholics and Politics in Germany in 1933,” in Pro Ecclesia 16 (2007), 141–164. His article on the biblical scholarship of Eusebius of Caesarea will appear in the forthcoming new edition of The Cambridge History of the Bible. His edition of Erik Peterson’s Theologische Traktate will appear in English translation in October 2011 (Stanford University Press). His next book project will be on the reception of Eusebius in the cultural and theological tradition. He is co-editor, with Catherine Cory, of the forthcoming third edition of the undergraduate textbook, The Christian Theological Tradition (Prentice-Hall).
Michael W. Jennings is the Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages; he focuses his research and teaching on the European literature, photography, and cultural theory of the twentieth century. He is the author of a study of Walter Benjamin’s theory of criticism, Dialectical Images, and the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin’s works. He has edited three volumes of Benjamin’s writings intended for a general audience: The Writer of Modern Life, an edition of Benjamin’s writings on Charles Baudelaire; with Brigid Doherty and Thomas Levin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, a volume of Benjamin’s writings on media; and, with Miriam Bratu Hansen, One Way Street. The first major biography of Benjamin, which he co-wrote with Howard Eiland, The Author as Producer, will appear in 2012. He recently published, with Detlef Mertins, a facsimile edition with critical apparatus of the avant-garde journal G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926 (Getty Research Institute, 2010). His published work includes articles on historicist cultural interpretation (Marxism and the New Historicism), photography (the photo essay in the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, Michael Schmidt, composite photography), the theory of art history (Alois Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer), modernism in its relationship to capitalist modernity (Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Uwe Johnson), Weimar culture and the new German society (Berlin Dada, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann), and eighteenth-century aesthetics (Sturm und Drang, Friedrich Hölderlin). He is currently at work on a book-length study of the German photo,essay in the twentieth century.
Gregory Kaplan, scholar of Jewish studies and comparative philosophy, teaches at Rice University. He has published several essays, co-edited two books, and written a monograph entitled Hallowing Days: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on Life Between the Secular and the Sacred (under contract with Fordham University Press). He is writing a book on the limits of Jewish identity and the paradoxical “Jewish non-Jew” from Saint Paul to George Costanza, and researching a book on the design of life in world philosophies. He is publisher of New Connections Press, LTD (Hong Kong) and Chief Executive Officer of Bridge21 Publications, LLC.
Professor Leonard V. Kaplan, the Mortimer Jackson Professor of Law, at the University of Wisconsin. He has been a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry since 1974. He is the immediate past president of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health. With Carles L. Cohen, he co-authored Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010). He is series editor of Graven Images, a book series with Lexington Press (Rowman & Littlefield), which he previously co-edited with Professor Andrew Weiner. He has been a Law Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin the last three years.
Rudy Koshar is the George L. Mosse WARF Professor of History, German & Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 2008 to 2011 he was director of the Religious Studies Program. His general field of study is modern German and European history, lately with an emphasis on the history of political culture and religious thought. His earlier research and teaching focused on modern German social history and cultural representation. Professor Koshar’s books and articles have ranged over a number of topics, including the social roots of Nazism, the lower middle classes in interwar European politics, historic preservation and German national identity, German memory cultures from 1870 to 1990, the history of consumption, the history of modern travel and leisure, film and historical representation, the poststructuralist turn in historical writing, Foucault and social theory, the history of the automobile in modern Europe, and Karl Barth’s place in modern European history. He has held Guggenheim, ACLS, German Academic Exchange Service, and Jean Monnet Fellowships. In 2009 he received the UW-Madison Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
John P. McCormick is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests include political thought in Renaissance Florence (specifically, Guicciardini and Machiavelli), nineteenth-and twentieth-century continental political and social theory (with a focus on Weimar Germany and Central European émigrés to theUnited States), the philosophy and sociology of law, the normative dimensions of European integration, and contemporary democratic theory. He is the author of Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge, 1997), and Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge, 2007). Professor McCormick has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as The American Political Science Review (1992, 1999, 2001, 2006) and Political Theory (1994, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2007). He recently published a book titled, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, 2011).
Michael McGillen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of German at Princeton University. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 2004 and an M.A. in German Literature from Princeton in 2009. He has been awarded DAAD scholarships for research in Germany in 2005 and 2009 and is the recipient of an Honorific Proctor Fellowship from Princeton University for the 2011–12 academic year. His dissertation project considers the importance of eschatology in German intellectual history from the 1920s through the 1930s.
Samuel Moyn is professor of history at Columbia University, where he has taught since 2001. His books are Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Cornell, 2005), A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Brandeis, 2005), and The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).
David Novak has held the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as professor of the study of religion and professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto since 1997. He is a member of University College, the Centre for Ethics, of the Joint Centre for Bioethics there. From 1966 to 1989 he served as a pulpit rabbi in several communities in the United States. From 1997 to 2002 he also was director of the Jewish Studies Program. In 2006 he received the Dean’s Award for Excellence. He is a founder, vice-president, and coordinator of the Jewish Law Panel of the Union for Traditional Judaism, and a founder and faculty member of the Institute of Traditional Judaism in Teaneck, New Jersey. He serves as vice president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City and is on the editorial board of its journal First Things. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and a member of the Board of Consulting Scholars of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. In 2007 he was appointed a member of Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, a federal agency, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He is the founder of the Tikvah Fund Seminar at Princeton University and continues to serve as senior scholar in it.
Novak is the author of 16 books, the last three being The Sanctity of Human Life (Georgetown University Press, 2007), Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, edited by Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Eerdmans, 2008), and In Defense of Religious Liberty (ISI Books, 2009). In 2000, his book Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton University Press, 2000) won the award of the American Academy of Religion for best book in constructive religious thought. He has edited four books and is the author of over 250 articles in scholarly and intellectual journals.
Carl J. Rasmussen practices law as a partner in the firm of Boardman & Clark LLP in Madison, Wisconsin. Rasmussen has served on the editorial board of the journal Graven Images and as a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He has published widely about theology and related topics. Among his publications are: “Justice, Justification and Responsibility in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics,” 4 Graven Images 86 (1998), originally published as “Gerechtigkeit, Rechtfertigung und Verantwortung in Dietrich Bonhoeffers ‘Ethik,’” trans. Ilse Tödt, 12 Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 119 (1995). Rasmussen is also the coauthor of The Library of Emmanuel College Cambridge: 1584–1637 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) with Sargent Bush, Jr.
Gabriel R. Ricci is professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, where he teaches in the history and philosophy departments. Following graduate work on Ernst Troeltsch and Martin Heidegger at Temple University and the Universität Hamburg he helped translate Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism, eds. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Temple University, 1989). He is the editor of two annual series, Religion and Public Life and Culture and Civilization, published by Transaction Publishers. He has published two books on historical consciousness, Time Consciousness, The Philosophical Uses of History (2002) and The Tempo of Modernity (2011) also with Transaction Publishers.
Ulrich Rosenhagen is assistant director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at UW-Madison as well as lecturer in religious studies. He is an ordained pastor, originally in the Evangelische Kirche von Kurhessen-Waldeck, Germany, and now in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Earlier this year he finished his dissertation “Fratricide, Sacred Liberty, and Supreme Judge—Religious Communication and Public Theology at the Time of the American Revolution” at the University of Heidelberg. Rosenhagen was a researcher at the Technical University of Dresden and has held a research fellowship at Boston University. Before joining UW-Madison, he served as associate pastor at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Coral Gables, Florida, and as a pastor in Marburg and Hanau, Germany.
Klaus Tanner is professor of systematic theology and ethics in the Faculty of Theology and Fellow at the Marsilius-Kolleg at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg. Previously he taught in the Theological Faculty at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, in the Philosophical Faculty of the Technical-University Dresden, and in the Theological Faculty at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. He is the author of Die fromme Verstaatlichung des Gewissens. Zur Auseinandersetzung um die Legitimität der Weimarer Reichsverfassung in Staatsrechtswissenschaft und Theologie der zwanziger Jahre (Göttingen, 1989). For more than 10 years he was a member of the Collaborative Research Center Institutionality and Historicity, where he coordinated the work for the project on “Ideas of the Welfare State and Concepts of Institutionalization in 19th-Century Germany.” He was a member of the German Parliament’s Study Commission on Law and Ethics in Modern Medicine (2000–2002), and is currently a member of the German federal government’s Central Ethics Committee for Stem Cell Research, the German Research Foundation’s Senate Commission on Genetic Research, the Ethics Advisory Board of the European Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry, and an elected member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina. His research fields are Protestantism and political culture in Germany, bioethics, and history of ethics. He has written on Protestantism and democracy, natural law traditions, and bioethics.
Azzan Yadin-Israel is associate professor of rabbinic literature at Rutgers University. His research focuses on early rabbinic legal hermeneutics, and specifically the interplay between scriptural interpretation and received tradition in tannaitic sources. His first book, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.