Peter Burgard came to Harvard in 1989 as an Assistant Professor, having received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and his B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University and having studied German and English Literature in Bonn as well as Law, briefly, in Cologne. He was Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities from 1994 to 1997 and since 1997 has been Professor of German.

The abiding focus of his thought, research, writing, and teaching is the critique of system.

He writes on poetry, drama, narrative, and the essay (not only German), on painting, sculpture, and architecture (Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, German, Austrian, English, and American), and on (primarily German) intellectual history, all ranging, in various combinations, from the 16th to the 20th century. His publications include studies of Luther, Caravaggio, Bernini, Opitz, Fleming, Gryphius, Hoffmannswaldau, Grimmelshausen, Asam, Goethe, Herder, Lessing, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Mann, Kafka, Adorno, Miller, and Warhol. He has for some time been finishing a book entitled Figures of Excess: Toward an Aesthetic of the Baroque, while also having developed and begun writing other books, including Decoration and Decorum: Vienna 1683–1914, Looking Awry: Bernini’s Chapels of Love, and Repression and Expression: Fin-de-siècle Literature and Art. He expects to keep spreading himself thin in this manner for the rest of his career.

Largely the same range obtains in his teaching, which includes courses on the Cultural and Political History of Munich from its founding to the present; Early Modern German Cultural History; Baroque Art and Literature; Goethe; the Age of Goethe; Nietzsche; Freud; the Ethics of Atheism; and Sexuality, Gender, and Language in Fin-de-siècle Literature and Art — the latter two in the Harvard College Program in General Education. He has also taught a European Studies Seminar on the Post-Wall Politics of Cultural Production and two Graduate Seminars in General Education. He is currently planning another new course: Thomas Mann — From Vision to Magician.

Beyond this, he devotes himself to teaching the German language on the advanced intermediate and advanced levels (this being the one thing in which he fully embraces system) — out of pleasure in grammar and in seeing students understand deeply the structure of the language and thus able to read sophisticated texts with precision; out of the knowledge that grammar is the structure of understanding and that reading is always a grammatical exercise; out of the conviction that, for the health and survival of language and literature departments, the lines customarily separating language instruction from upper division courses at elite universities must be crossed; and out of simple pleasure in being good at it.

Finally, he spends two months every summer teaching and managing the Harvard Summer Program in Munich, which he founded in 2002 as one of Harvard’s first curricular programs abroad.

 

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Burgard has been a Humboldt, IFK, Fulbright, and DAAD Fellow and a visiting scholar at Princeton and the universities of Bonn and Munich. His other professional commitments and activities include, besides curating an exhibition at the Busch-Reisinger Museum entitled "As though my body were naught but ciphers": Crises of Representation in Fin–de–siècle Vienna (2005): national and international conference presentations, the conceptualization and organization of local and international symposia and symposium series, guest lectures at universities in North America and Europe, and extensive administrative work (e.g., Faculty Council and Standing Committees on the Core Curriculum, on Education Abroad, on European Studies, on Women's Studies, and on Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies). He has directed or co-directed seventeen dissertations. He is an Associate of Adams House and the Signet Society. He was Head Tutor in German (Director of Undergraduate Studies) for most of the 1990's and has been Director of Graduate Studies in German since 2001.

 

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Figures of Excess: Toward an Aesthetic of the Baroque. Book in progress.

“Flemings verdrehte Osculo-Logik und die Ästhetik des Barock,” in Was ein Poëte kan! - Paul Fleming 1609-1640, ed. Stefanie Arend and Claus Sittig, forthcoming 2012.

“Desacralization of the Sacred: Caravaggio, Bernini, Asam,” forthcoming in Erosionen der Rhetorik?, ed. Valeska von Rosen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011).

“Masterful Rhetoric: The Logic of Authority and Subjection in Luther,” in The Global Luther: A Theologian for Modern Times, ed. Christine Helmer (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2009), pp. 266–283.

“The Trouble with Saying I: Simplicissimus and Its Emblem,” Daphnis 36 (2007/2009): 565–592.

“Dead Metaphor Society? From Opitz to Hoffmannswaldau,” Neophilologus 93, 2 (2009): 295–310.

“Of Aprons, Buses, and Bridges: Kafka’s Judgment,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays in Honor of Reinhold Brinkmann, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 285–310.

Barock: Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001), Editor.

“The Art of Dissimulation: Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew,” Pantheon: Internationale Jahreszeitschrift für Kunst 56 (1998): 95–102.

Nietzsche and the Feminine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994),  Editor.

“Adorno, Goethe, and the Politics of the Essay,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 66 (1992): 160–191.

Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay (University Park: Penn State Press, 1992).

“Literary History and Historical Truth: Herder–‘Shakespeare’–Goethe,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 65 (1991): 636–652.

“Two Parts Ibsen, One Part American Dream: On Derivation and Originality in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,” Orbis Litterarum 43 (1988): 336–353.

“Unlikely Affinities: Warhol and Goethe,” Mosaic 21, 1 (1988): 37–47.

“Lessing’s Tragic Topography: The Rejection of Society and Its Spatial Metaphor in Philotas,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 61 (1987): 441–456.

“From ‘Enttäuschung’ to ‘Tristan’: The Devolution of a Language Crisis in Thomas Mann’s Early Work,” German Quarterly 59 (1986): 431–448.

“Emilia Galotti und Clavigo: Werthers Pflichtlektüre und unsere,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 104 (1985): 481–494.