Open Lecture: "Poetic and Cosmic Rhythm: the Logos and its Measure in Heraclitus and Hopkins"
Thomas Pfau began his academic career in 1980 as a history and literature student at the University of Constance. In 1982 he came to the United States, where at UC-Irvine he joined the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature and Theory. In 1985, he continued his studies in the Comparative Literature Program at SUNY-Buffalo, where he received his PhD in 1989 with a dissertation on self-consciousness in Romantic poetry and theory (Wordsworth, Shelley et al). Since that time, his interests have gradually broadened to include 18th and 19th century literature, philosophy and intellectual history. He has edited seven collections of essays and special issues of journals, and is the author of four monographs: Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP 1997), Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790-1840 (Johns Hopkins UP 2005), Minding the Modern: Intellectual Traditions, Human Agency, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame UP, 2013), and Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame UP, 2022). He is interested in the Platonic tradition and its reception in modernity.