Simon Richter is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and member of the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature. Courses he has recently taught include: GRMN 001, “Looking for Lola: The Allure of a Cinematic Name,” GRMN 257, "Nazi Cinema," GRMN 256, "The Devil's Pact in Literature, Music & Film," GRMN 550: “The German Connection: Hollywood and Berlin, GRMN 630: “Religion, Literature, and the Bible in the German Enlightenment.”

Richter is author of Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy and the Body in the German Enlightenmentand Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain. Richter specializes in gender studies and the history and theory of the body, especially in relation to the eighteenth century. His 1996 article on "The Ins and Outs of Intimacy: Gender, Epistolary Culture, and the Public Sphere" won the Max Kade Prize for Best Article in the German Quarterly. Unwrapping Goethe's Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge (co-edited with Susanne Kord and Burkhard Henke) appeared in late 1999 in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth. Richter also edited volume seven of the Camden House History of German Literature, The Literature of Weimar Classicism (2005). A brief version of his introduction to this volume is accessible in The Literary Encyclopedia. He has published articles in the areas of history of medicine, gay and lesbian studies, aesthetics, opera and literature, the process of digestion, German foodways, cinema studies, cultural studies and on authors such as Sophie von La Roche, Theresa Huber, Winckelmann, Lessing, Heinse, Eichendorff, Hegel, Max Frisch, Goethe, Moritz, Büchner, Schiller, Habermas, and Sophie Mereau. 

Richter is currently working on a project about the cinematic tradition based on the figure of Lola Montez, a nineteenth-century British woman of humble origins who used her sexuality and prevaricating charm to rise to worldwide renown as an erotic dancer and the lover of composers (Lizst) and kings (Ludwig of Bavaria), leaving disaster in her wake. Ever since Marlene Dietrich’s seductive role as Lola Lola, the risqué nightclub entertainer in Joseph Sternberg’s scandalous Blue Angel (1930), the name Lola has specified the realm of the quintessential vamp. Richter explores the cinematic femininity, sexuality and gender associated with the name Lola (and its close cousins Lulu and Lolita). In the process he encounters Lolas of ambiguous, precocious, calculating, and irresistible sexuality: a Turkish-German transvestite, a sexual nymph, a schemer during Germany ’s economic miracle, and a man-killer eventually slain by Jack the Ripper, and many more. This project arose as an undergraduate class. Thanks to the Provost’s Undergraduate Mentoring Fund, Richter and an undergraduate student recently researched the first American Lola film at various archives in Los Angeles, including the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

A second larger project bears the title The Impropriety of Goethe: Case Studies in the Aesthetics of Adulation. In this book Richter sets out to explore our current fastidiousness about large claims made on behalf of aesthetics by focusing on cases of exorbitant response to Goethe’s person and works. Manifestations of such impropriety include the obsessive collection of Goethe “relics” by William Speck, the esoteric interpretation of Goethe by Rudolf Steiner, encounters with Goethe in Nazi concentration camps, and the cult of Goethe among German Jews around 1900, not to mention the extreme responses of Karl Philipp Moritz, Eckermann, and Bettina von Arnim. This research will take Richter to numerous archives and remote locations.

Richter is an enthusiastic undergraduate and graduate teacher. He was awarded the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2008. He is very interested in computer applications in the humanities. In summer 2005 and 2006 he initiated and directed “The Graduate School Experience,” a program designed to give a select group of rising juniors from colleges and universities a foretaste of graduate studies in German. This program was cosponsored by the DAAD and the Max Kade Foundation and continues in rotation among a handful of universities. Richter is the president of the Goethe Society of North America, a lively organization that prides itself in cultivating younger generations of Goethe scholars, and former editor of the Goethe Yearbook. He has served on the editorial board of German Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. He is a board member of the American Association of Netherlandic Studies.

Richter also speaks Dutch and has projects in the area of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, a study of the author and Goethe aficionado Boudewijn Büch, and the recently assassinated filmmaker Theo van Gogh. In his spare time, Richter hones his cooking skills and improves on an ever more elaborate rijsttafel (an extravagant Indonesian spread). He has also resumed playing ice hockey after more than thirty years. His two sons, Toby (8) and Sam (6), are bilingual and love reading Asterix und Obelix.

updated 08-2008