Klaus Mladek

|Associate Professor
Academic Appointments

Associate Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature

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Klaus Mladek is Associate Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on 18th through 20th-century political theory, philosophy, theater, performance studies, affect theory and psychoanalysis. In the book A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt (Princeton University Press 2023), he and George Edmondson explore an affirmative mode of melancholic politics. He edited Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis (Duke University Press 2017) with George Edmondson, a collection about the collapse and resurgence of the sovereign exception in our times. He is also the editor of Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution (Palgrave 2007) and the author of Stages of Justice: Encounters of Politics, Theater and Philosophy from Socrates to Arendt (forthcoming with Northwestern University Press). In the collection In the Wake of the Plague: Eros and Mourning (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming), he and James Godley investigate the political, mental and social life in the aftermath of Covid-19. He is currently completing a monograph Walter Benjamin's Demons: Revolution and the Idea of Justice. Recent articles and book chapters are on Kafka and the theater, on conspiracy theory, justice and conflict, on populism, the politics of crisis, torture and shame, on melancholic politics, on the American jury system and on the idea of justice in Walter Benjamin. Books in progress are on the interlacement of justice and conflict (stasis) since Homer's Iliad and Plato's Republic as well as a study entitled Criminal Subjects: Politics vs. Police in Literature and Philosophy after Kant. He has received research grants from the NEH, the ACLS, the Humboldt Foundation, the Center for German and European Studies and the University of California Psychoanalytic Consortium.

Contact

646-2711
Dartmouth Hall, Room 212
HB 6084

Department(s)

German Studies

Education

  • Magister Artium, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt/Main
  • M.A. University of California
  • Ph.D. University of California

Selected Publications

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Works In Progress

Walter Benjamin's Demons: Revolution and the Idea of Justice 

Criminal Subjects: Politics vs. Police in Literature and Philosophy after Kant