Dr Peter Zusi

Lecturer in Czech with Slovak Studies

Email
p.zusi@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Phone Number
020 7679 8817

Fax
020 7679 8777

I studied literature at Yale (BA) and comparative literature and social thought at the University of Chicago (MA, PhD), where my original interest in German literature rapidly expanded to include Czech literature in particular and central European literature in general. My doctoral dissertation examined intellectual and ideological functions of the notion of "historicism" in Czech and German avant-gardes in the interwar period. After defending my dissertation I taught for several years in the Slavic department at Harvard.

I am currently writing a book about Kafka and Czech modernism, and am co-editor of the journal Central Europe.

Research Interests
Modern Czech and German literature and culture; theory of modernism and the avant-garde; literature in relation to the visual arts, particularly architecture; Kafka; philosophy of history; and cultural history of central Europe from the Enlightenment onward. I have a particular interest in points of contact and conflict between Czech and German culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Teaching and supervision
I teach courses on Czech literature from the eighteenth century to the present and contribute to team-taught courses on central and east European literature and cinema. I supervise PhD dissertations on Czech and central European literature and culture.

Selected Publications

• "States of Shock: Kafka and Richard Weiner", forthcoming in Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson, eds, Kafka, Prague, and the First World War (Oxford Kafka Studies, Vol. 2).
• "History's Loose Ends: Jáchym Topol and the Structure of Velvet Revolutions", forthcoming in Brigitte Gautier, ed., Changer le monde avec des mots.
• "Nové dějiny, nová moderna" [review essay on Papoušek et al., Nové dějiny moderny (Prague, 2010)] in Česká literatura 59.3 (2011): 406-410.
• "Tendentious Modernism: Karel Teige's Path to Functionalism." In Slavic Review 67/4 (Winter 2008).
• "Toward a Genealogy of Modernism: Herder, Nietzsche, History." In Modern Language Quarterly 67.4 (December 2006): 505-525.
• "'Wie ein Kind ist unser Volk': Hybrid Identity and National Consciousness in Rilke's Zwei Prager Geschichten." In The German Quarterly 79.3 (Summer 2006): 329-346.
• "'Kein abgefallenes Blatt ohne Wirkung geblieben': Organicism and Pluralism in Herder's Metaphorics of Culture." In Sabine Groß and Gerhard Sauder, eds., Der frühe und der späte Herder: Kontinuität und/oder Korrektur (Synchron Verlag, 2007): 89-97.
• "The Style of the Present: Karel Teige on Constructivism and Poetism." Representations 88 (Fall 2004): 102-124.
• "Echoes of the Epochal: Historicism and the Realism Debate." Comparative Literature 56.3 (Summer 2004): 207-226.

This page last modified Monday 20 June 2011.