DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Samuel Weber is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern and co-director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory.

Professor Weber studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book, Prisms, he co-translated into English. The translation of, and introduction to Theodor Adorno's most important book of cultural criticism helped define the way in which the work of the Frankfurt School would be read and understood in the English-speaking world. Professor Weber has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation. In the 1980s he worked in Germany as a “dramaturge” in theater and opera productions. Out of the confrontation of that experience with his work in critical theory came the book, Theatricality as Medium, published in 2004 by Fordham University Press. In 2005 he published Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking, also at Fordham. In 2010 he published a book-length study of Walter Benjamin, “Benjamin’s -abilities,” Harvard University Press, and in 2014, “Inquiétantes singularities,” a French collection of texts translated by Northwestern dual PhD, Charles Coustille. Weber's two most recent book publications are:  "Singularity: Politics and Poetics," University of Minnesota Press, 2021, and Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the Plague," Zone Books, 2022. He is currently working on two book projects, “Reconsidering the Uncanny: Freud, Heidegger, Derrida,” and “Kafka’s Uncanny Animals.

For more information on the work of Professor Weber visit Media Theory & Psychoanalysis & Philosophy