James McFarland
Associate Professor of German | Cinema and Media Arts
James McFarland studied philosophy at Oberlin College and the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. He took his doctorate in German Studies from Princeton University. He has taught literature, philosophy, and film in Germany, Russia and the United States, and is currently an Assistant Professor of German at Vanderbilt University. He has published on Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s collaboration with Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus, Peter Szondi’s reception of Walter Benjamin, the “Unabomber Manifesto” and academic rhetoric, and the political theology of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, among other matters.
Specializations
idealist philosophy, nietzsche, critical theory, film, modernism
Representative Publications
Books
- Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 344 pages.
Essays
- “One-Way Street: Childhood and Improvisation at the Close of the Book,” The Germanic Review 87:3, 2012. 293-303.
- “Sailing by the Stars: Constellations in the Space of Thought.” in MLN Vol. 126, No. 3 (2011). Special issue Constellations/Konstellationen. 471-485.
- “Der Fall Faustus: Continuity and Displacement in Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Thomas Mann’s Californian Exile,” in New German Critique 34 (2007), 111-139.
- "Philosophy of the Living Dead: At the Origin of the Zombie-Image," in Cultural Critique 90 (Spring 2015)