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
Gregory Maertz received graduate degrees from Harvard University, where he specialized in British and German Romanticism (theory, poetry, and fiction), and he wrote his dissertation at the University of Heidelberg as a Fulbright Graduate Fellow and a Sinclair Kennedy Fellow. Prior to his arrival at St. John’s, he taught at Washington University in Saint Louis as a Mellon Faculty Fellow. More recently, he has held visiting appointments in the German Department at Duke University and in the Writer’s Centre at Yale University’s Singapore campus, where he taught classes on the visual arts of the Third Reich and intersections between Modernism and National Socialist cultural production. He has held honorific fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. His publications include the books Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy, Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany, Literature and the Cult of Personality, and Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age as well as a critical edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and articles in the collections Acts of Possession, Art and Artistic Life During Two World Wars, The New Man in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-45, Kunst und Propaganda in der Wehrmacht, Modernism, Christianity and the Apocalypse, Narrative Ironies, and Romantic Prose Fiction. His articles and reviews have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, German Studies Review, Michigan Germanic Studies, Modernism/modernity, Papers on Language and Literature, The Pater Newsletter, Patterns of Prejudice, Scottish Literary Journal, Studies in Scottish Literature, University of Mississippi Studies in English, The Victorian Newsletter, Wiener Slawistisches Jahrbuch, Jahrbuch des Wiener Goethe-Vereins, and The Wordsworth Circle. Art exhibitions that he has co-curated include Kunst i Kamp [Art in Battle] at KODE: Art Museums in Bergen, Norway (September 2015-February 2016) and Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930-1945 [Art and Propaganda in the Conflict of Nations] at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin (January-April 2007). His current projects include a study of Adolf Hitler’s collection of modernist art, a critical edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, and an anthology of German art theory and criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. At St. John’s he has been a finalist for Student Government Teacher of the Year and the recipient of multiple Faculty Recognition Awards, Summer Research Grants, and Seed Grants.