Jane Newman
Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches Renaissance and Early Modern Comparative Studies. She has served as Chair of the Department of European Languages and Studies, Director of the UC Irvine Center for the Study of Early Cultures, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Newman’s first two books, Pastoral Conventions (Hopkins, 1990) and The Intervention of Philology (North Carolina, 2000), discuss the German 17th century; she has also published essays on 16th and 17th century English, German, and neo-Latin literature and culture and the disciplinary history of Renaissance and Baroque Studies. Her third book, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque, appeared in Fall, 2011, with Cornell University Press, and received Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Scaglione Prize in Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2012. Her translation of a collection of the German-Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Erich Auerbach’s essays, Time, History, and Literature. Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, appeared with Princeton University Press in January, 2014, and won the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Translation of a Scholarly Work in 2015. Newman has held Guggenheim and Humboldt fellowships, was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Berlin, Germany, in 2010-11, the M.H. Abrams Fellow at the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle, North Carolina) during 2015-16, and the John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities, American Academy in Berlin, Berlin, Germany, in 2017. In 2023-24, she was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (USA). Newman has been a guest professor at UC Berkeley and Princeton University. She is currently working on two book projects: “Early / Modern Mimesis: Essays on Erich Auerbach” and “After Westphalia: Pre- and Early Modern Lessons for a Post-Modern Age.” She is on the Steering Committee of the U.S. Section of the Scholars at Risk network and the Advisory Board of the Academy in Exile (Dortmund, Germany) and is the co-Chair of the University of California Systemwide Co-ordinating Committee for Scholars at Risk.