Christian J. Emden

For Christian Emden, Associate Professor in German Studies, teaching and research are closely connected; a class is only really successful when he sees his students thinking independently—often “outside the box”—and matching their skills with recent research in intellectual history and political thought. “Too many courses,” he says, “rely on spoonfeeding textbooks, while students are often most excited when they discover the pertinent research questions by themselves—albeit with some guidance.” With guest lectures and workshops at Stanford University and Ohio State University, 2008/9 was a busy year for Emden, who also directs the History of Philosophy Workshop. 2009/10 will bring him, among other places, to Washington D.C. and Oxford. After the recent publication of his second book on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with Cambridge University Press, his research will delve once again into the history of political thought, dealing with the tense relationship between political power and rule, on the one hand, and commitments to the practice of democracy, on the other. This will take him into the final years of Imperial Germany and into the Weimar Republic but also into 1960s America, when he will look at social and legal thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt.