Albrecht Classen


Full Name: 
Albrecht Classen

Academic Rank: Professsor
Affiliation: University of Arizona
Address:  Department of German Studies 
                  University of Arizona
                  Tucson, Arizona
                  United States
Email: 

Background

Albrecht Classen was born in 1956 near Bad Hersfeld in Northern Hesse. He studied at the universities of Marburg  and Erlangen (Germany), Millersville, PA (USA), Oxford (Great Britain), Salamanca (Spain), Urbino (Italy), and Charlottesville, VA (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986.  He has a broad range of research interests covering the history of German and European literature and culture from about 800 to 1800, but he also pays close attention to contemporary conditions, including politics, economy, sports, and literature. He is also a poet of his own rights and has so far published nine volumes of his own texts in German, most recently: Hawaiische Impressionen (2013) and Sonora: harter Klang (2015).  He is an active contributor to the literary journal Trans-Lit2, for which he also serves as the book review editor. For many years he has written poetry and has published nine volumes so far, apart from many contributions to Trans-Lit2 and other journals. In 2016 he was selected as a member of the PEN-Zentrum deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland (PEN Center of German-Speaking Authors Abroad). In 2018 he published his first volume of satires, Amerikanische Satiren (Leipzig: Engelsdorfer Verlag).

Selected Publications

1- Margareta von Schwangau: Epistolary Literature in the Late Middle Ages,” Medieval Perspectives, ed. by Pedro S. Campa et al., Collected Papers of the XIIIth SEMA, Chattanooga, TN, October 1985, 41-53
2- Hessische und Braunschweigische Soldaten in Virginia,“: Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde 91 (1986): 81-93
3- Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Der antizipatorische Charakter des ersten Buches,” Carleton Germanic Papers 15 (1987): 1-16
4- Wolframs von Eschenbach Titurel-Fragmente und Johanns von Würzburg Wilhelm von Österreich: Höhepunkte der höfischen Minnereden,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 37 (1993): 75-102
5- Dialogics and Loss of Identity: Linguistic Community and Self-Destructive Individuation in Wernher the Gardener’s Helmbrecht,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 41 (1995): 143-160
6- Why Do Their Words Fail? Communicative Strategies in the Hildebrandslied,”  Modern Philology 93 (1995): 1-22
7- Diu Klage – A Modern Text from the Middle Ages?,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen XCVI, 3 (1995): 315-329
8- Family Life in the High and Late Middle Ages. The Testimony of German Literary Sources,” Medieval Family Roles. A Book of Essays. Ed. Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre (New York-London: Garland, 1996), 39-65
9- German Women Writing Letters: Exploration of Literacy and Female Challenge to the Literary Canon in the Later Middle Ages,” Disputatio 1 (1996): 89-121
10- Medieval Manuscript Evidence Versus Modern (Mis)Interpretation: The Klage,” International Fiction Review 24.1& 2 (1997): 1-11