Liliane Weissberg is Professor of German and Comparative Literature. She is also a member of the Center in Folklore and Ethnography, the Jewish Studies Program, the Art History Graduate Group, and the Advisory Committee in Women's Studies.  

Weissberg's interests focus on late eighteenth-century to early twentieth-century German literature and philosophy, and interdisciplinary studies. Much of her work has concentrated on German, European, and American Romanticism, but she has also written on the notion of representation in realism, on photography, and on literary and feminist theory. Her most recent books are a critical edition of Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997), which has received much attention, and the anthologies, Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan Ben-Amos, 1999) and Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001). 

Most of Weissberg's work in recent years has been concerned with the  recovery of a German-Jewish literary and cultural tradition. She has worked extensively on Jewish women writers of the early nineteenth century, such as Henriette Herz, Dorothea Schlegel, Regina Frohberg, and Rahel Varnhagen. She is currently completing a book on early German-Jewish autobiography that will center on Salomon Maimon, Lazarus Bendavid, Henriette Herz, Moses Mendelssohn, and Benjamin Veitel Ephraim. 

Weissberg is the General Editor of Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, a book series published by Wayne State University Press, and is on the editorial board of the Lessing Yearbook, Poe Studies and Medienkultur. 

Beyond the more "traditional" scholarly work of a literary critic, Weissberg has contributed to several museum catalogues and has also been heard on the BBC World Service, Hessischer Rundfunk and the CBC in Toronto. 

Weissberg's courses have included seminars on contemporary German women's literature, on turn of the century Vienna, on the Enlightenment, on letters and literature, and on literary theory. In the fall of 2004, she taught GRMN 252/COLL004, a pilot course on "The Emergence of the Individual" (together with Maurice Samuels), and GRMN 580 "Walter Benjamin" (crosslisted with COML582 and ENGL592). In the fall of 2008, she teaches GRMN 242 "Fantastic & Uncanny in Literature " and GRMN 540 "Memory, Trauma, Culture".

See curriculum vitae

Sixty Second Lecture at Penn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_SIlfj9fzg

updated 03-2009