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Dr. Rolf Goebel

Professor of German
Email:goebelr@uah.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Born in Kiel, Germany, Dr. Rolf J. Goebel holds degrees from Brown University (M.A. in English, 1977), the University of Kiel (Staatsexamen in German and English, 1979), and the University of Maryland (Ph.D. in German Literature, 1982). Since 1982 he has been teaching German language and culture at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he was promoted to Full Professor in 1998. In 1987-88 he spent a year at Osaka University, Japan as an exchange lecturer in English. His areas of research are German modernism and contemporary culture and media. In addition to numerous articles and conference papers, he has published three books: Kritik und Revision: Kafkas Rezeption mythologischer, biblischer und historischer Traditionen (Critique and Revision: Kafka’s Reception of Mythological, Biblical, and Historical Traditions,1986), Constructing China: Kafka’s Orientalist Discourse (1997), and Benjamin heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (Benjamin Today: Urban Discourse, Postcoloniality, and Flânerie between Cultures, 2001). He is also the co-author of A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (2005) and is currently editing A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin for Camden House. His essay “Berlin’s Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity” won the 2004 William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in PMLA during the preceding academic year.

Rolf Goebel is also active as an organist. He is currently serving as Sub-Dean of the Greater Huntsville, AL Chapter of the American Guild of Organist and has given numerous local recitals and introductory organ workshops. He is especially interested in the German, English, and French repertoire of the 16th to 18th centuries.