David Ferris
1330 Grandview
Professor and Chair, Dept. of Comparitive Literature and Humanities
Biography
David Ferris (Ph.D., SUNY-Buffalo) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities. Prior to teaching at CU-Boulder he held concurrent positions in Comparative Literature, English and German at the Graduate School and in Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, in Comparative Literature and English at Yale University, and in English at Haverford College. His recent publications include essays on Adorno and Modernism, Benjamin and photography, Vattimo and the postmodern. He is also a contributor to the ACLA’s Ten Year Report on the Discipline. His current projects include two books: Politics after Aesthetics and Postmodern Mimesis: The Ethics of Distortion. He has received a Senior Faculty Research Fellowship from the ACLS, NEH Summer Research Grant, and has been a Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale.
Teaching Interests
Modern European literature-especially poetry, modernity and the postmodern, photography and painting, reception of the Enlightenment in the 19th and 20th centuries, lyric poetry, 19th and 20th century aesthetics and literary theory, the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, political theory, 18th and late 20th century painting.
Current Courses
- COML 6040: 1968: Politics after Aesthetics (Fall 2008) Course Website (Syllabus)
- HUMN 2000: Methods/Approaches to the Humanities (Fall 2008)
Upcoming Courses
- HUMN 3660: The Postmodern (Spring 2009) Course Website (Syllabus)
- HUMN: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (2009-2010)
- HUMN: Cinematic Narrative
Recent Courses
- COML 5370/ENGL 5549: Modern Lyric
- COML 6040: Histories of the Real: The Modern and the Postmodern
- HUMN 4093: Modernity/Postmodernity
- COML 6040: Politics and Aesthetics
- COML 5000: Proseminar in Comparative Literature