German Studies
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Christian J. Emden

Associate Professor, Undergraduate Advisor

Emden

Email: emden@rice.edu Phone: x5312 Office: 326 Rayzor Hall

Education

  • PhD, University of Cambridge, England, 2000
  • MPhil, University of Cambridge, England, 1997

Areas of Interest

  • modern German intellectual history (1750-present)
  • history of European political thought
  • cultural studies of scientific knowledge
  • the legacy of the Enlightenment

Personal Statement

Christian J. Emden's work focuses on modern German and European intellectual history and political thought. Before coming to Rice, he was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and taught at the University of Cambridge, England. At Rice, he directs Focus Europe, an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in European Studies, and the History of Philosophy Workshop, sponsored by the Humanities Research Center. Professor Emden is on the editorial board of the Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie, co-editor of the book series Cultural History and Literary Imagination, and an external reviewer for the European Science Foundation.

Over the last years, Professor Emden’s research has focused on the intersections among philosophy, science and historicism in nineteenth-century Germany, on the rise of historische Kulturwissenschaft around 1900, and on political thought in the period between the 1870s and 1930s. He is the author of three books: Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (2005), Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne (2006), and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (2008). 

Professor Emden is currently working on four long-term projects: The first project, On Epistemic Images, explores the role of images in the production of scientific knowledge from early modern Europe to the contemporary neurosciences. The second project is Networks: Cultural History of a Philosophical Metaphor. The third project, The Invention of Antiquity: Politics, Memory, and the Classical Tradition in Germany, 1755-1935, traces the links between classicism and the political imagination in Germany. Finally, a fourth project investigates Democracy and Rule: Political Realism in Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt, dealing with the limits of liberalism and the relationship between state authority and democracy in modern thought. Professor Emden is also interested in the relationship between money and the political experience of modernity as it is reflected in German thought around 1900.

Selected Publications

  • Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  • Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft um 1930 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006).
  • Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
  • Ed. with David Midgley, Public Interests, Public Spheres: Knowledge, Governance, and Civil Society (New York: Berghahn, forthcoming in 2009).
  • Ed. with Gabriele Rippl, ImageScapes: Studies in Intermediality (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2009).
  • Ed. with David Midgley, Fragile Traditions: Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World since 1500 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004).
  • “Theorizing the Political in Germany, 1890-1945: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann,” European History Quarterly 38 (2008), 608-25.
  • “Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and the Limits of Liberalism,” Telos 142 (Spring 2008), 110-34.
  • “Nation, Identität, Gedächtnis: Überlegungen zur Geschichtlichkeit des Politischen,” in Michael C. Frank and Gabriele Rippl (eds.), Arbeit am Gedächtnis: Für Aleida Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), pp. 63-86.
  • “Toward a Critical Historicism: History and Politics in Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation,” Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006), 1-31.
  • “Learning How To Read: Nietzsche in Leipzig,” Oxford German Studies 35 (2006), 97-110.
  • “Epistemische Konstellationen: Gehirne, Telegraphen und die Netzwerke des Wissens um 1900,” in Jürgen Barkhoff, Hartmut Böhme, and Jeanne Riou (eds.), Netzwerke: Eine Kulturtechnik der Moderne (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), pp. 127-54.