Eric L. Santner
· Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Germanic StudiesUniversity of Chicago · Germanic Studies
Active 1982–2025
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About
Eric L. Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching since 1996. His research interests encompass Literary and Cultural Theory; German-Jewish Literature and Thought; Modernism; Psychoanalytic Theory; and Religion and Literature. Santner's work is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, and religious thought, reflecting a cross-disciplinary approach that is also evident in his teaching, which includes co-taught seminars with philosophers, historians of religion, anthropologists, political theorists, and psychoanalysts. He came to the University of Chicago after twelve years at Princeton University and originally engaged with German Studies through philosophy, having studied at Oberlin College and furthering his philosophical education in Bonn and Freiburg, focusing on Kant, Heidegger, and Hegel. His intellectual trajectory was shaped by a desire to incorporate poetic thinking, inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin, and to explore the legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust, influenced by his background as the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His engagement with Freud's writings, alongside figures like Kafka, Rilke, Schreber, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Sebald, has informed his inquiries into memory, mourning, and memorialization. Santner has mentored students working on German philosophy, German-Jewish…
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Political Science
- Philosophy
Selected publications
Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment
2019-12-16 · 20 citations
book"William Mazzarella, Eric Santner, and Aaron Schuster join forces to analyze the disorienting experience of politics in the Trump era. Drawing from anthropology, media theory, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the coauthors show how Trump's compulsive self-branding generates a correspondingly obsessive attention on the part of the public. By retweeting news about Trump, whether in praise or in scorn, the public participates in the manufacturing and reproduction of the Trump brand…
2019-01-01 · 11 citations
book2022 · 10 citations
1st authorCorrespondingUniversity of Chicago Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations
1st authorCorrespondingToward a caninical theory of the neighbor
Konferenser / · 2025-06-27
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 16 shared
James Lastra
Sesame Workshop
- 16 shared
David C. Levin
Tel Aviv University
- 16 shared
James T. Chandler
Whitney Museum of American Art
- 16 shared
Bradin Cormack
Wayne State University
- 16 shared
Lauren Berlant
- 16 shared
Elizabeth Helsinger
- 16 shared
Yuri My
Whitney Museum of American Art
- 16 shared
Robert B. Pippin
Awards & honors
- The Tanner Lectures in Human Values (2016)
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imag…
- The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames…
- On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (2006)
- The Neighbor. Three Inquiries in Political Theology (2005)
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