DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Susannah Gottlieb (B.A. Yale University, Ph.D. University of Chicago) teaches in the areas of twentieth-century literature and thought. Her interests include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, continental philosophy and political theory, German-Jewish intellectual history, and Asian American literary traditions. She is the author of Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Auden and the Muse of History (Stanford University Press, 2022—finalist for the Pegasus Award in Criticism).  She is also editor of Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2007). Some of her other articles and essays include “Two Versions of Voltaire: W. H. Auden and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (PMLA); "‘Reflection on the Right to Will’: Auden’s ‘Canzone’ and Arendt’s Notes on Willing” (Comparative Literature); “‘Seit jener Zeit’:  Hannah Arendt und ihre Literaturkritik” (TEXT + KRITIK); “‘With Conscious Artifice’: Auden’s Defense of Marriage” (Diacritics); “‘Everyone Is Welcome’: Arendt and the Spirit of Non-pomposity” (GFPJ); “Beyond Tragedy: Arendt, Rogat, and the Judges in Jerusalem” (College Literature); “Reflections on Ruin” (New Formations); “Homing Pidgins: Another Version of Pastoral" (Babel in America, Harvard UP);  “Auden on History” (Auden in Context, Cambridge UP); “The Fallen Empire” (Auden at Work, Palgrave); “Autobiography and Arendt’s Defense of Poetry” (Bloomsbury Companion to Hannah Arendt).  She is the founding Editor of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Series at Northwestern University Press.  Her current book project is entitled Constraining Voices: Arendt, Speech, Silence.

Gottlieb has delivered the Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at Princeton University; the Hannah Arendt-Reiner Schürmann Memorial Lecture in Political Philosophy at the New School for Social Research; the Hannah Arendt Lecture at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University; and the Joff Hanauer Lecture at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Seattle.  Some of her other recent activities include lectures at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at The University of Virginia; the British Academy at The University of Southampton; the Center for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths University of London; the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin; the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale; the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University; the Zentrum für Literature- und Kulturforschung in Berlin; the Center for Theoretical Inquiry at Indiana University; the Department of Germanic Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania; the Humanities Center at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; the Program in Poetics and Theory at NYU; and a series of lectures at the Department of Literature and Theory at Beijing Normal University, Beijing.

The Poetry & Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern University

Specializations

American: 20th Century, Critical Race & Ethnicity Studies, Poetry & Poetics, Literary Theory, Asian American Literature, Modern

Books

Auden and the Muse of History (Stanford University Press, 2023)

Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and Culture (editor, Stanford University Press, 2007)

Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden (Stanford University Press, 2003)

The Drinking Gourd Poetry Series
(Northwestern University Press, 2013-)