Rate My Professor Norbert Christian Wolf

Norbert Christian Wolf serves as University Professor for Modern German Literature at the Institute for German Studies, University of Vienna, a position he has held since September 2020. He also directs the institute. Born in 1970 in Innsbruck, Austria, Wolf pursued studies in German Studies and History at the University of Vienna from 1989 to 1991 and 1992 to 1994, complemented by studies in Paris at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, École Normale Supérieure Fontenay-St. Cloud, and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1991–1992, as well as at the Free University of Berlin in 1992. He obtained his Magister philosophiae degree from the University of Vienna in 1994, his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 1999 (supported by a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, 1995–1998), and habilitation from the same institution in 2009. His research specializations encompass German-language literature of the 18th to 21st centuries, Austrian literature, literary sociology, literary aesthetics, intermediality, literary theory, Enlightenment studies, Classicism research, classical modernism, and contemporary literature.

Wolf's professional trajectory includes research assistant roles at the University of Vienna (1994–1995, on an FWF project on cultural processes in monastic literature) and Free University of Berlin (1998–2004), an APART fellowship in Vienna (2004), junior professorship in Modern German Literature and Literary Theory at FU Berlin (2005–2009), and University Professor at the University of Salzburg (2009–2020). Among his major publications are Streitbare Ästhetik: Goethes kunst- und literaturtheoretische Schriften 1771–1789 (Niemeyer, 2001), Kakanien als Gesellschaftskonstruktion: Robert Musils Sozioanalyse des 20. Jahrhunderts (Böhlau, 2011), Eine Triumphpforte österreichischer Kunst: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Gründung der Salzburger Festspiele (Jung und Jung, 2014), Revolution in Wien: Die literarische Intelligenz im politischen Umbruch 1918/19 (Böhlau, 2018), and Glanz und Elend der Aufklärung in Wien: Voraussetzungen – Institutionen – Texte (Böhlau, 2023). Recent contributions include articles on Europe-conceptions in interwar Austrian literature (2021), the media history of ephemerality (2021), polemics in classical modernism (2022), and hybrid identities in Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (2024). His work advances insights into literature's engagement with historical, social, and political transformations in German and Austrian contexts.