Michael McGillen

Michael McGillen is Assistant Professor of German Studies and an Associated faculty member in Comparative Literature. He teaches in German Studies, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies, and offers courses on Modernist Literature, Urban Spaces, German-Jewish Exile Literature, Cultures of Memory, Kafka, Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, Religion and the Post-Secular, as well as German language courses on all levels. His research concerns the afterlives of religion in German modernism, with a focus on German-Jewish literature and intellectual history, temporalities of the moment and historical memory, and discourses of secularization. He is the author of articles on Arendt, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Auerbach, Sebald, Johnson, Beckett, Husserl, Blumenberg, Barth, and Ball, and his work has appeared in journals such as New German Critique, The Germanic Review, Word & Image, and Gegenwartsliteratur. 

His book Shapes of Time: History and Eschatology in the Modernist Imagination was published in 2023 with Cornell University Press in the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures and Thought. It tells the story of how four key figures in modern German and German-Jewish thought—Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil—combined religious thought and modernist mathematics to represent a moment of time outside of narrative sequence that they pictured spatially in the language of geometrical shapes and forms. Conceiving of the shape of time as a curved and nonintuitive space in which apparently parallel lines intersect and time folds back on itself, these writers offered alternatives to the historicist paradigm of linear and chronological time. Through close readings and conceptual analysis of literary, theological, and philosophical texts, the book offers new insights into the afterlives of religion in modernity and into modernism's spatial and mathematical turns.

His current research explores the temporalities of memory in postwar German and German-Jewish literature and thought. It includes an article on "Historical Passages and Scenes of Transport in Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage" and essay on "Reality's Return: On the Inconsolability of Memory in Sebald." A recent article on "Hannah Arendt, David Rousset, and the Imagination of Living Death" examines the translation of memory cultures, and a forthcoming essay on the poetry of Nelly Sachs analyzes dust as a poetic medium of mourning. A second book project titled Writing History after Benjamin: Literature and the Chronopoetics of Memory, currently in progress, analyzes the development of a post-Benjaminian chronopoetics of historical memory in the work of Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge.