Liliane Weissberg

Her parents were political refugees who had fled from Poland in 1949.

She grew up in Frankfurt, Germany.

Liliane Weissberg (born 1953) is an American literary scholar and cultural historian specializing in German-Jewish studies and German and American literature.

She is currently the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

She received, among others, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Research Award for her research on German-Jewish literature and culture and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, and holds an honorary degree from the University of Graz.

Liliane Weissberg was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1953 to a Jewish family.

Weissberg graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 1977 with a master's degree in general and comparative literature, German studies, and linguistics.

After teaching as an assistant professor of German at Johns Hopkins University (1983-1989), Weissberg joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor of German and Comparative Literature in 1989 and was promoted to full professor in 1994.

She was the Joseph B. Glossberg Term Chair in the Humanities for several years.

She obtained a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 1984, concentrating on American, German, and French literature.

Her dissertation thesis examined allegories in Edgar Allan Poe.

Since 2004, she has been the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences.

At Penn, she has several times served as graduate chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and as Director of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.

Weissberg has been a guest professor at several universities in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (Princeton, Hamburg, Aachen, Frankfurt, the Humboldt University Berlin, Potsdam, Bochum, the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, Innsbruck, Vienna, the ETH Zurich), and has held visiting chairs at the University of Hamburg, the University of Graz, and the University of Kassel.

She has also been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Munich, the Dubnow Institute in Leipzig, and the IFK Vienna.

Weissberg has curated exhibitions at the Slought Gallery at Penn, Jewish Museum Frankfurt, and the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach.

She has served on numerous institutional boards,is currently a member of the board of the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the advisory board of the Leo Baeck Institute London, and the Center for Jewish Studies, Graz.

She was one of the founding members of the Research Center Sanssouci for the Study of the Enlightenment (RECS), a collaboration between the University of Potsdam and the Public Castles and Gardens Sanssouci, and served on the advisory board of the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam.

Weissberg has also been a guest speaker on several radio shows, including BBC World Service, CBC Toronto, Deutschlandfunk, Hessischer Rundfunk, Bayerischer Rundfunk, NPR and the MLA radio service.

With her books and more than 200 academic articles, Weissberg's research has covered German and American literature from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, cultural studies, literary and psychoanalytic theory, aesthetics and material culture.

She has contributed to the rediscovery of German-Jewish literary and cultural traditions and has researched the German-Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala), Romanticism in America and Europe, German realism, and visual studies.

Weissberg has also studied issues concerning the Holocaust.

She has extensively dealt with figures like Edgar Allan Poe, Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt, Dorothea Schlegel, Henriette Herz, Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist.