Erica Weitzman

Bluster as Bourgeois Style

Erica Weitzman is currently a fellow in the 2025/2026 class at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is Associate Professor of German Studies at Northwestern University. Professor Weitzman is the author of two monographs. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2012. Prior to joining the Department of German at Northwestern in 2014, she was a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universität Konstanz in the German Research Foundation (DFG) Graduiertenkolleg “Das Reale in der Kultur der Moderne” from 2012–13, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2013–14. She was also a doctoral fellow in the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Lebensformen und Lebenswissen” from 2008–11, a Faculty Fellow at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern in 2016–17, and a visiting scholar at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin with a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2017–18. In 2020 she was selected as an AT&T Research Fellow at Northwestern for the years 2020–22.

Her most recent book, At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter (Northwestern University Press, 2021), examines the fear of “mere matter” in German thought and its consequences for German realist literature from Stifter to Kafka. Her first book, Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2015), explores the role of “comic irony” in early twentieth-century German literature and its roots in romantic irony’s challenge to idealist thinking. She also co-edited the collected volume Suspensionen. Über das Untote (Fink, 2015), which considers aspects of “the undead” as a figure that destabilizes both the life/death binary and the epistemological regimes that correspond to it. Currently, she is developing a project that examines “bluster” as rhetorical mode in late nineteenth-century Germany.