Paul Michael Lützeler


Paul Michael Lutzeler is a German-American scholar of German studies and comparative literature. He teaches as Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

Life

Lutzeler studied German and English Literature, Philosophy and History in Berlin, Edinburgh, Vienna and Munich. In 1968 he emigrated to the United States and in 1972 he defended his dissertation at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 1973 he moved to St. Louis, where he became a professor at Washington University. He was Chair of the Washington
University Faculty Senate Council from 1993 to 1995. In 1983 he founded the European Studies Program at Washington University, of which he was in charge for 20 years. In 1985 he founded the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature, which he still chairs. He chaired the German department from 1983 to 1988. Since 1985 he has been inviting an author and a critic from one of the German-speaking countries every year to St. Louis for teaching and researching. In 2002 he founded the yearbook Gegenwartsliteratur. A German Studies Yearbook of which he was the Editor in Chief until 2020. Lutzeler was also engaged in exchange programs between Washington University and different European, American and Asian universities. From 2010 to 2019 he worked on the committee of the transatlantic postdoc exchange funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. He was guest professor in Princeton, Tübingen, Graz, Mainz, Greifswald, Freiburg, New Delhi, Beijing, Madrid, and Tokyo among others. He taught block seminars at universities in Melbourne, Pavia, Guadalajara, Jerusalem and Zadar.
Lutzeler is President of the IAB, president of the AFM (American
Friends of the German Literary Archives in Marbach am Neckar from 2012 to 2019 and was from 2005 to 2010 Vice-President of Internationale Vereinigung für Germanistik. He is a corresponding member of two academies in Germany: The Academy of Science and Literature, and the Northrhine-Westfalian Academy of Science and Art and also a member of the Academia Europaea. He was a member of the strategy commission of the Wissenschaftsrat der Bundesrepublik Deutschland from 2011-2016, and he is a member of the German PEN Club. Since 2015, he has also been a member of the Executive Committee of Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik. Lutzeler is a German and American citizen and lives in St. Louis. He is married and has two adult children.

Work

Lutzeler's main research interests are contemporary German literature, the literary discourse about Europe, German speaking Exile-Literature in the U.S., and German and European Romanticism. Lutzeler is an expert for the Austro-American exile-author Hermann Broch, whose works he edited and whose biography he has written. He also published essays and books about the discourses of postmodernism, postcolonialism, continentalization, and globalization. Several of his works were translated into foreign languages. He also wrote for German newspapers and magazines like Die Zeit, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, Die Welt, Frankfurter Rundschau, the Neue Rundschau and the Merkur.

Awards