Ulrich Baer is a University Professor at New York University, where he has taught since 1995 in the departments of German, Comparative Literature, English, and in the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts. He studied at Harvard (B.A.) and Yale (Ph.D.), has held Guggenheim, Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships, has twice won NYU’s Golden Dozen teaching award, and formerly directed NYU’s Center for the Humanities. He writes about literature, photography, and free speech for publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. He also teaches live online classes through Roundtable and hosts two podcasts: Think About It, conversations with writers and scholars about big ideas and great books, and The Proust Questionnaire, with Caroline Weber.
Contact: ucb1@nyu.edu
Essays & Articles
Essays
- Digging Deeper into HemingwayPublishers Weekly, 2022
- “My Darling Oscar”: A Forgotten Letter by Oscar Wilde’s Lover Harbors Another SecretLos Angeles Review of Books, 2021
- Buber on NietzscheThe New York Review of Books, 2021
- What Universities Get Wrong About Free SpeechOxford University Press blog, 2019
- Free Speech and Equality on CampusPublic Books, 2019
- What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free SpeechThe New York Times, 2017
- The Sovereign Contingency of Lovein Lyle Ashton Harris, Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs (Aperture), 2018
- Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage: The Photography of WitnessingGrey Art Gallery Gazette, 2014
- Ends of a World: On Thomas Demand’s PhotographyIrish Museum of Modern Art, 2007
- The Painting of Horizons: On Diti Almog’s WorkTel Aviv Museum of Art, 2006
- Catastrophe and the Literary ImaginationAmerican Letters and Commentary, 2002
- The De-Demonization of Evil: Banality, Arendt, SartreCabinet, 2001
- Writing an Act of Testimony: Ferdinand Bruckner’s RaceClassic Stage Company, 2001
Scholarly Articles
- Photography and the World: The Total World and Many, Many WorldsYearbook of Comparative Literature, 2014
- To Give Memory a PlaceThe Spectralities Reader, 2013
- The Status of the Correspondence in Rilke’s WorkThe Cambridge Companion to Rilke, 2010
- Seeing the Future in an Image of the Past: Hannah Arendt, Garry Winogrand, and Photographing the WorldYearbook of Comparative Literature, 2009
- Teaching Todesfuge as a Canonical Holocaust PoemTeaching the Representation of the Holocaust (MLA), 2004
- Introduction: Paul Celan TodayNew German Critique, 2004
- The Perfection of Poetry: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul CelanNew German Critique, 2004
- Learning to Speak Like a Victim: Media and Authenticity in Marcel Beyer’s FlughundeGegenwartsliteratur, 2003
- Reflections on Using Holocaust Survivor Testimonies in TeachingFortunoff Video Archive, 2000
- To Give Memory a Place: The Holocaust and Landscape PhotographyRepresentations 69, 2000
- Contemporary Holocaust Photography: The Landscape of Loss and the Limits of the DocumentSouth Atlantic Quarterly, 1998
- Landscape and Memory in the Work of Paul CelanSemiotics, 1996
- Photography and History in BaudelaireSemiotics, 1995
- Photography and Hysteria: Toward a Poetics of the FlashThe Yale Journal of Criticism, 1994
- Paul Celan, Ethics, and the Figure of the FeminineSemiotics, 1994