Basic information
Thomas Oliver Beebee
Home address: 123 Osmond Street Institutional Address: Dept. of Comparative Literature
State College, PA 16801 231 Burrowes Bldg.
Tel.: 814-233-1089 Penn State University
E-mail: tob@psu.edu University Park, PA 16802
FAX: 814-863-8882 Tel.: 814-863-4935
EDUCATION
1973-77 B.A. Dartmouth College (Summa cum laude) Major: Comparative Literature
1977-78 M.A. University of Michigan Field: Comparative Literature
1978-84 Ph.D. University of Michigan Field: Comparative Literature,
PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS
1984-86 Assistant Professor of German, Bowdoin College
1986-92 Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University
1992-2000 Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University
Fall, 1993 Visiting Scholar (Fulbright), Department of English, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil
2000-08 Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University
2000-01 Visiting Scholar, Romance Languages, The Johns Hopkins University
2008- Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University
2012- Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University
HONORS & AWARDS
1977 Phi Beta Kappa (Alpha of New Hampshire)
1979 Delta Phi Alpha Honor Society for German Scholars
1991 Honorary Inductee, Phi Sigma Iota Foreign Language Honor Society
1992 Class of 1933 Humanities Award, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State University
1993 Eisenhower Award for Excellence in Teaching, Penn State University
2010 Faculty Scholar Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities, Penn State University
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Penn State:
Comparative Literature:
Graduate Seminars: Digital Humanities; History of Literary Criticism and Theory; Contemporary Theory; Literary Translation; Literary Biography and Autobiography; Inter-American Literature; New World Apocalypse; Epistolarity; Transnationalism and Intranationalism (with Thomas Hale); The Teaching of World Literature (with Thomas Hale); Tragedy (with Dennis Schmidt).
Undergraduate Seminars: Senior Seminar in Literary Criticism and Theory; Inter-American Literature; Film and Literature; First-year Seminar in Diaries, Confessions, and Letters; First-year Seminar in The Power of Literature; Western Literary Heritage Since the Renaissance
Undergraduate General Education Lecture Courses: Literature of the Americas; Western Masterpieces since the Renaissance; Forms of World Literature; Introduction to Comparative Literature; The Development of Literary Humor; Crime and Detection in World Literature.
German:
Seminars: German Theory and Criticism; Wagner, Nietzsche, Mann; Classicism and Romanticism; The German Novel; German Cinema and History; Franz Kafka; German Literature as World Literature
Undergraduate Major Courses: German Literature in its Historical and Social Contexts; Introduction to Literature; Intermediate and Advanced Composition and Conversation; German Music and Literature in the 19th Century; Goethe.
Undergraduate General Education Lecture Courses: German Culture to WWII; Contemporary German Culture.
Global Studies:
Undergraduate Seminar: Globalization
Portuguese
Undergraduate Recitation Course: Portuguese 001, 002, and 003
Teaching (cont.):
Other Institutions:
“What is Comparative Literature?” Series of five lectures delivered to the College of International Relations, Nihon University, Mishima, Japan, June 2006.
“Walter Bejamin and Contemporary Literary Theory.” Series of five invited lectures delivered to the College of the Humanities, State University of Londrina, Brazil, August 2007.
“Current trends in Cultural Studies.” Series of three lectures delivered to the Department of Foreign Languages, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, November 2007. (Also to the Department of Foreign Languages, National Sun-yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan).
“Brazilian Conto and Crônica.” Seminar for the Program in Inter-American Studies, University of Bielefeld, Germany, May 2013.
“World Lit and World Lit Crit.” School of Foreign Studies, Tsinghua Univeristy, June 2015.
PUBLICATIONS
Single-Authored Books:
Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1990. xi + 228 pp.
The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability. University Park: Penn State Press, 1994. viii + 303 pp.
Epistolary Fiction in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x+277 pp.
Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. xiii+248 pp.
Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction (220 pp.) Purdue UP Series in Comparative Cultural Studies, 2008. x+200 pp.
Citation and Precedent: Structural Couplings of German Law and Literature. New York: Continuum P, 2011.
Transmesis: Inside Translation's Black Box. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Edited Book:
Thomas O. Beebee, editor. German Literature as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 212 + xii pp.
Translations:
With Qing-yun Wu. The Remote Country of Women. From the Chinese of Bai Hua. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1994. 369 pp.
Kafka’s Leopards. From the Portuguese of Moacyr Scliar. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2011.
Jorge Amado: The Penn State Lectures. Transcribed, Translated, and Edited by Thomas O. Beebee, Caroline Egan, and Dawn Taylor. Private printing.
Selected Refereed Journal Articles:
"The Letter Killeth: The Pli of Death in Jean-Paul Marat's Epistolary Fiction." Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, Philosophy of History 21.3 (Spring 1992): 217-41. Translated into Chinese as “Huoxing baocang: Lun Mala xiaoshuo zhong de siwang heihan.” Zhongwai Wenxue 263 (April 1994): 33-56.
“The Fiction of Translation: Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages.” Sub-stance 23.1 (1994): 63-78.
“Talking Maps: Region and Revolution in Juan Benet’s Volverás a Región and Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões.” Comparative Literature 47.3 (Summer 1995): 193-214.
“The Rifled Mailbag: Robber as Reader in Epistolary Fiction." Revue de Littérature Comparée (Jan.-Mar. 1996): 14-36.
Joshua M. Getz and Thomas O. Beebee. “The Epistolary Politics of Amos Oz’s Black Box.” Prooftexts 18.1 (January 1998): 45-65.
“Tryptichs of Solipsism: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Fogo Morto by José Lins do Rego.” The Comparatist (1999): 63-88.
Thomas O. Beebee and Beverly Weber. "A Literature of Theory: Christa Wolf's Kassandra Lectures as Feminist Anti-Poetics." German Quarterly 74.3 (Summer 2001): 257-77.
Journal Articles (cont.):
“Ways of Seeing Italy: Landscapes of Nation in Goethe’s Italienische Reise and its Counter-Narratives.” Monatshefte 94.3 (2002): 322-45.
Thomas O. Beebee and Lenka Pankova. “Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars as Translational Fiction.” Serbian Studies 18.2 (2004): 339-59.
“Carl Schmitt and the Myth of Benito Cereno.” seminar 42.2 (May 2006): 114-35.
“Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters.”Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20.1 (2007): 61-88.
“Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20.1 (2007): 61-88.
“The Canudos Perplex: Three Early Factions.” Terra Roxa 10.2 (2007): 3-20.
“Brazil without Brazilians: The Geopolitics of Amazônia in Márcio Souza’s Fiction.” CLCWeb 11.3 (Sept. 2009). http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol11/iss3/4/. 7300 words.
Thomas O. Beebee and Ikuho Amano. “Pseudotranslation in the Fiction of Akutagawa Ryunosuke.” Translation Studies 3.1 (2010): 17-32.
“Shoot the Transtraitor! The Translator as Homo Sacer in Fiction and Reality.” The Translator 16.2 (2010): 1-19.
“The Triangulated Transtextuality of José Eduardo Agualusa’s Nação Crioula: A Correspondência Secreta de Fradique Mendes.” Luso-Brazilian Review 47.1 (2010): 190-213.
“Can Law and Humanities Survive Systems Theory?” Law and Literature 22.2 (Summer 2010): 244-68.
"What in the World does Friedrich Nietzsche have Against World Literature?" Neohelicon. 38.2 (2011): 367-79.
Selected Book Chapters:
"The Öffentlichkeit of Jürgen Habermas: The Frankfurt School's Most Influential Concept?" Rethinking the Frankfurt School. Ed. Jeffrey Nealon and Karin Irr. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). 187-204.
“Beyond Lecture and Discussion: The World’s Oldest Approaches to Literature.” Teaching World Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: MLA, 2009. 266-79.
“From Nobel to Nothingness: The Negative Monumentality of Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse.” German Literature as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 137-56.
“Cultural Entanglements and Ethnographic Refractions: Theodor Koch-Grünberg in Brazil.” Kulturconfusão: On German-Brazilian Interculturalities. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 95-115.
“Translation.” Literature Now: Key Terms and Methods for Literary History. Ed. Sascha Bru, Ben de Bruyn, and Michel Delville. Edinburgh: U of Edinburgh P, 2016. 59-72.
Book Reviews and Review Essays in: Biography ; Clio; Comparative Literature Studies; German Quarterly, Journal of English and Germanic Philology; Luso-Brazilian Review; Philosophy and Literature; Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research; Renaissance Quarterly; Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos; Signos; Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature
RECENT PAPERS AND SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
“Colonial Letters: Towards a Taxonomy.” MLA Annual Convention, Washington, D. C., December 2005.
“From E-pistles to E-mail.” ACLA Annual Convention, Princeton, NJ, April 2006.
Professional Papers (cont.):
“Triangular Trade: The Co-Construction of National Identities in José Eduardo Agualusa’s Nação Crioula” and “From E-pistles to E-mail.” International Comparative Literature Association Triennial Convention, Rio de Janeiro, August 2007.
“Transmesis and Postcolonial Reason.” Invited lecture delivered to the Department of English, Taiwan National Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2007.
“Can Law and Humanities Survive Systems Theory?” John Jay College of Criminal Justice Conference on Law and Humanities, New York City, March 2008.
“The DNA of the Lamb: The Race for the End (Times) in American Millennial Fiction.” Colloquium on Violence and Religion Conference, Riverside, CA, April 2008.
“Censorship From Below: Pathways of Canonicity in Weimar Germany.” Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Boston, April 2009.
“Bordering Brazil: Political, Cultural, and Literary Frontiers of Latin America’s Largest Nation.” Conference on Beyond Borders, Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany, June 2009.
“Weimar 1919: Walter Benjamin’s Constitutional Criticism.” MLA Annual Convention, Los Angeles, January 2011.
“Together at the Ends of the Earth: Millennial Discourses of the Americas.” Annual Conference of the Association for Inter-American Studies. University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, November 2011.
“Friedrich Nietzsche and the Question of World Literature.” 10th Triennial Congress of the Chinese Comparative Literature Association. Fudan University, Shanghai, China, August 2011. (Plenary address)
Roundtable participant, “Comparing Modern Literatures Worldwide: Can It Be Done within the Current MLA Structure?” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Seattle, Washington, January 2012.
“What the World Thinks About Literature: A Manifesto.” Invited lecture to the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Nebraska, March 2014.
“Reader Response: For Real, this Time?” Special Event Lecture to the Comparative Languages and Theory Group, Northeast Modern Languages Association Annual Convention, April 2014.
“Can Karl Kraus ‘Live Away’ from Austria? Translational Virtuality in Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project (2013).” Berlin Program Summer Workshop on “Virtual Germans,” Free University of Berlin, June 2014.
“What is Kafkaesque? Ask My Lawyer: Citations of Kafka in the US Legal System.” German Studies Association Annual Convention, Kansas City, September 2014.
“Year of Double Death: The Goethe Centenary in Weimar 1932.” Triennial Conference of the Goethe Society of North America, University of Pittsburgh, October 2014.
EDITORIAL ACTIVITIES
Editor-in-Chief: Comparative Literature Studies (2001- )
Editorial Boards: Comparative Literature Studies (1992-2001); Diogenes’ Tub (Bari, Italy); Terra Roxa (State University of Londrina, Brazil); Signos (Univates, Brazil); Recherche Littéraire; Comparative Literature and World Literature
Referee for journals: CLCWeb; Comparative Literature Studies; College English; Eighteenth-Century Fiction; Mosaic; Philament (University of Sydney); Social Dynamics (U of Capetown); Senhas (U of Santa Catarina, Brazil); The Translator; Modern Language Studies; seminar, Translation Studies
Reader for presses: Bloomsbury P; Bucknell UP; Cambridge UP; Johns Hopkins UP; Modern Language Association; Penn State P; Purdue UP; Routledge P; U of Calgary P.
GRADUATE THESES SUPERVISED
Twenty-one doctoral dissertations (eighteen in Comparative Literature, three in German), have been completed under my orientation, with four currently in progress. Altogether, I have served on more than 40 Penn State doctoral dissertation committees in Comparative Literature, English, French, German, Spanish, Philosophy, Speech Communication, Art Education, and Geography.
GRANTS
1990 NEH Travel to Collections Grant for research in Paris, France. $750
1991 Jacobs Research Fellowship (Penn State); one semester teaching release. $7000
1991 Folger Institute Grant-in-Aid (to attend Folger Seminar and conduct research). $1367
1993 Fulbright Lecturing/Research Fellowship, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil. $21,000
1997 Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies Grant (Penn State) for research in Bahia, Brazil. $1500
1998-2000 Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies Term Fellowship (Penn State). $6000
2014 Humanities in a Digital Age Initiative Grant (Penn State). $6000 (additional $4000 granted for Spring)
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AND SERVICE
1994-98 NEH Evaluation Committee: Summer Stipend Grants (French, German, and Slavic; again 2005-07, 2012)
1995-97 CIES Disciplinary Advisory Committee for Fulbright Scholar Awards (Comparative Literature)
2003- President, Phi Beta Kappa Lambda Chapter, Penn State University
1999-2001 Representative of the ACLA to the Field Committee for the National Initiative for a Networked
Cultural Heritage Project
2004-07 Member, ACLA Advisory Board (3-year term)
2008-14 Member, Executive Committee, MLA Division on Comparative Studies in 20th-Century Literature
2010 ACLS Fellowships Review Panel
Tenure and Promotion: Evaluator for Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Boston University, Cornell University, Haverford College, Queen’s College (CUNY), Ramapo State University, UCLA, University of Illinois – Urbana, University of Illinois – Chicago, University of North Texas.
External Program Review: Evaluator for Comparative Literature & Classics (Cal State Long Beach); Comparative Literature (Bryn Mawr/Haverford)