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, 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 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 is appearing in November 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 how German and German-Jewish writers in the post-Holocaust era responded to the problem of a lost inheritance, what it meant to live and write in exile, and how to engage with the German past in the absence of a tradition that could be renewed. This research 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," and a second book project entitled Lost Inheritances: Traumatic Memory and the Narration of History in Postwar German Literature, which examines how the problems of inheritance, exile, and tradition were negotiated by postwar writers through a turn to narrative modes such as anecdotes, stories, and myths.