Dr. Gregory Maertz

Dr. Gregory Maertz

Professor

B.A., Northwestern University, Comparative Literature
A.M., Harvard University, Comparative Literature
A.M., Harvard University, English and American Literature and Language
Ph.D., Harvard University, Comparative Literature

 

 

 

Research Focus: Romanticism; the Novel; Fascism Studies; Aesthetic Theory; Twentieth-Century Art

Dr. Gregory Maertz is Professor of English and teaches courses on Romanticism and Fascism Studies. He studied languages and literature at Northwestern, Georgetown, and Heidelberg, and earned his graduate degrees at Harvard. His scholarly books include Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy (2021), Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany (2019), Literature and the Cult of Personality: Essays on Goethe and His Influence (2017), which are available from Columbia University Press, and critical editions of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (both published by Broadview Press). In addition, he has curated exhibitions in Berlin and Bergen, Norway, on the art of the Third Reich. Maertz’s research on literature and art has been supported by major grants from the NEH, the ACLS, the National Humanities Center, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, CASVA at the National Gallery of Art, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has held visiting positions at Washington University in St. Louis and Duke.

      The Charisma of Animals is Dr. Maertz’s first volume of verse. Completed during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems incorporate structural and sonic echoes of formalism in brief lyrics and longer narratives which seek to make transient, intensely personal experiences—love and loss, illness and recovery, encounters with nature and animals as well as history and works of art—concrete and accessible. They belong to the province of sensations, memories, dreams, and sacred places: the fishing village of Gravir in the Outer Hebrides (home of Eriskay ponies, the eponymous white horses), the Hawaiian Islands, Lake Minnetonka, Manhattan, Heidelberg, Munich, Bergen, Paris, and Griggstown, an historic village on the outskirts of Princeton, New Jersey, where Dr. Maertz makes his home with Hooksy, a big orange tabby, in a former cidery.

 

 

Check out his new books at Columbia University Press: