Joined Connecticut College: 2003

• 19th Century German Philosophy
• Weimar Republic Modernism
• Film Theory

James McFarland’s intellectual interests extend from the epistemology of Leibniz to the political theology of George Romero. He has taught in Germany, Russia and the United States on topics ranging from the philosophy of tragedy to the concept of history in Emerson, Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin.

His interest in both philosophy and literature is longstanding. He majored in English literature and philosophy in college, and studied German Idealist philosophy and Critical Theory for three years in Kiel, Germany, where he lived from 1988 to 1993. His dissertation examined the Nietzschean context of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy.

His recent publications include:

An essay on Thomas Mann and Theodor A. Adorno: “Der Fall Faustus: Continuity and Displacement in Theodor Weisengrund Adorno and Thomas Mann’s Californian Exile”, New German Critique, issue 100.

Translation of Prof. Eva Geulen’s book Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel appeared with Stanford University Press in 2006 as The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel, in their advanced theory series Cultural Memory in the Present.

A translation of “Against Private Circles,” and “Original Assimilation” by Hannah Arendt, as well as the essay “‘Big Hannah’ – My Aunt” by Edna Brocke, appeared in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

A commissioned review of Eric Downing’s After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung for the professional journal The German Quarterly.

View the German studies department and Film Studies program Web site.