Short Bio

Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and responsible for the MA-program in “World Literature.” He was Assistant Professor for American Culture at the John F. Kennnedy-Institute, Berlin, from 1996 to 2002, taught American Literature at the University of Bielefeld in 2006, and was Professor for American Studies at the University of Stavanger, Norway, from 2006-2009.

He is the author of Grenzfälle: Mythos – Ideologie – American Studies (Trier: wvt, 1998) and Aesthetics & Ethics: Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), and the co-author, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (Darmstadt: VS Verlag, 2016). He is the editor of The Common Growl (New York: Fordham UP, 2016) and The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (New York: Fordham UP, 2015). He has also co-edited several volumes: “Mirror Writing”: (Re-)Constructions of Native American Identity (Glienicke/Cambridge: Galda + Wilch Verlag, 2000) (with Maria Moss), Theories of American Studies/Theories of American Culture, REAL-Band Nr. 19 (Tübingen: Narr, 2003) (with Winfried Fluck), Neo-Realism: Between Innovation and Continuation, special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004) (with Maria Moss), Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006) (with Ulla Haselstein and Sieglinde Lemke), and Critique of Authenticity (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2020) (with Britta Sweers and Kornelia Imesch).

He has published widely on issues of community, recognition, literary theory, and moral philosophy. Among his most recent essays are: “A Critique of Authenticity and Recognition” (Critique of Authenticity, 2020), ”Neorealism, Contingency, and the Linguistic Turn” (Humanities, 2019), “Where Are Jacques and Ernesto When You Need Them? Rancière and Laclau on Populism, Experts and Contingency“ (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019), “Melville, Whitman, and Metonymy: Towards a New Poetics of Community” (Textual Practice, 2019), “A Metonymic Community? Toward a Poetics of Contingency” (The Common Growl, 2016), and “Traces of a Metonymic Society in American Literary History” (American Studies Today, 2015).