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Martin Puchner Named Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Cambridge, Mass. - May 11, 2010 - Martin Puchner, a prolific and wide-ranging author of works on modern drama, philosophy, and world literature, has been named professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard University, effective July 1, 2010.
Puchner comes to Harvard from Columbia University, where he has been the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature since 2006.
"A rising star, Professor Puchner is widely regarded as a vital presence of growing stature and influence," says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "His writings have reshaped how we see modernism, theatricality, and performance. With his range, acuity, and depth, he will benefit not only his department and the students in his courses, but the humanities and arts at Harvard as a whole."
Puchner has written extensively on drama, philosophy, and world literature for both scholarly and general audiences. He is an editor of the Norton Anthology of Drama (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009) and serves as the new general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and the Norton Anthology of Western Literature.
Puchner's writings on drama have included "Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama" (Johns Hopkins Press, 2002), which has realigned how practitioners and scholars view the rise of modern drama from the late 19th through the early 20th century. In "Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes" (Princeton University Press, 2005) -- which won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Award -- he addressed the relationship between avant-garde art and revolutionary thought over the last 150 years, producing a thorough, historically informed, and theoretically acute work. Co-edited with Alan Ackerman, Jr., "Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), used drama and theater to highlight the values and contradictions of modernism.
Among numerous other works, Puchner has edited an edition of "Six Plays of Henrik Ibsen" (Barnes & Noble, 2003) and a four-volume collection of critical essays on modern drama titled "Modern Drama: Critical Concepts" (Routledge, 2008).
Puchner's interest in philosophy relates primarily to drama and theater, offering new perspectives on such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Burke. He has just published a volume titled "The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy" (Oxford University Press, 2010), and is currently at work on a new book on theater and philosophy, tentatively titled "Theater as a Form of Thought."
In addition to his scholarly work, Puchner has written essays on contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics for The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Raritan Review, and N+1.
Puchner received his undergraduate degree from Konstanz University in 1992, an M.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1994, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard in 1998. He joined Columbia as assistant professor of English in 1998, becoming associate professor and associate chair of the Department of English in 2005. He was a visiting associate professor of English at Cornell University in 2004-05.
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