Eric L. Santner is an American scholar. He is Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, and Chair, in the Department of Germanic Studies, at the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, where he has been based since 1996.

He was graduated from Oberlin College

Oberlin College

Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...

 in 1977, and undertook graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...

, receiving his doctorate in 1984. Santner then taught at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

.

His writing covers literature and psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

, religion and philosophy. It deals with German poetry, post-war Germany, and the Holocaust. His 2001 book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig tackles the question of religious tolerance using the work of the Jewish religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig

Franz Rosenzweig

Franz Rosenzweig was an influential Jewish theologian and philosopher.-Early life:Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany to a middle-class, minimally observant Jewish family...

.

Works

• Friedrich Hoelderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination (1986)
• Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (1990)
• My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity (1996)
• On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (2001)
• Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (2003) editor with Moishe Postone
  Moishe Postone
  Moishe Postone is a professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he is part of the Committee on Jewish Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in 1983...
  
  .
• The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (2005) with Slavoj Žižek
  Slavoj Žižek
  Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
  
   and Kenneth Reinhard
• On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (2006)

External links

• Faculty and Staff, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago