Chris Hoffman

Chris works on modern German and French literature and critical theory. He studied in Chicago, Paris, Hamburg, and New York, receiving his Ph.D. in 2024 from Columbia. He is the Core Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages, teaching Contemporary Civilization.

His book project, “Life Conduct and Literature in Modernism,” studies the consequences of the dissolution of literature’s inherited educational role around 1900. It combines a genealogy of spiritual exercise in French and German literature from the early modern period through to the twentieth century with studies of how authors like Kafka, Walser, and Brecht rediscover literature’s affordances for formative life practice. The project illuminates the renewed interest in literature’s therapeutic role as a source of wisdom, from literary studies to the corporate world.

His further research studies the resonances and exchanges between distinct traditions of critical theory, especially the German tradition, Black American thought, and Francophone Decolonial movements. He is contributing a chapter on Hortense Spillers’s reception of critical theory in a collected volume on Adorno and Identity, forthcoming with SUNY Press. He has co-edited a special issue of Colloquia Germanica on “Hannah Arendt and Literature,” forthcoming in Spring 2025, to which he contributed an article on Arendt’s use of biography in her literary criticism.