Rudolf Mrázek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies
Professor of Judaic Studies
he/him/his
Office Information:
3204 MLB
Graduate Faculty; German; Faculty; Germanic Languages and Literatures
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University
Highlighted Work and Publications
Modernism without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories
Scott Spector
Nowhere else have Jews contributed so massively and consequentially to the general culture than in Germany. From Mendelssohn to Marx, from Freud to Einstein, Jewish contributions to secular German thought have been both wide-ranging in scope and profound in their impact. But how are these intellectual innovations contributions to European Jewish culture? How are they to be defined as Jewish? Scott Spector argues for a return to the actual subjects of German-Jewish history as a way to understand them and their worlds. By engaging deeply with the individual as well as with the...
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Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914
Scott Spector
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna and Berlin were centers of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a sense of triumphalism and confidence in progress. Yet they were also sites of fascination with urban decay, often focused on sexual and criminal deviants and the tales of violence surrounding them. Sensational media reports fed the prurient public’s hunger for stories from the criminal underworld: sadism, sexual murder, serial killings, accusations of Jewish ritual child murder—as well as male and female homosexuality.
In Violent Sensations, Scott Spector explores ...
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After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault
Edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog
Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms...
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Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle
Scott Spector
Scott Spector's adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary...
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