Department Personnel : Elisabeth Weber, Chair

[Faculty] [Affiliated Faculty] [Staff & Advisors] [Emeriti]

Elisabeth Weber received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 1988; Chair of the Program of Comparative Literature; Affiliate Professor of Religious Studies.

Her research interests and publications include French philosophy and theory; psychoanalysis and trauma-studies; German Judaism of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; nineteenth- and twentieth century German literature. Her teaching experience includes a visiting associate professorship at The Johns Hopkins University. In 1998, she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

She is the author of Verfolgung und Trauma. Zu Emmanuel Levinas' Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (1990) awarded a prize by the Dr. Margrit Egnér Foundation. She is the editor of Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich (1994, published in French as Questions au Judaïsme, 1996, and in English as Questioning Judaism. Stanford 2004), a collection of interviews with Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and others. She is the co-editor of Das Vergessen(e). Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren (1997), the editor of several works by Jacques Derrida, and German translator of texts by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Félix Guattari.

In 2003, she organized, together with Thomas Carlson (Religious Studies), an international conference with Jacques Derrida on “Irreconcilable Differences? Jacques Derrida and the Question of Religion.”

Presently, she is working with other UCSB faculty on a collaborative project entitled “Torture and the Future. Perspectives from the Humanities”, which won the “Critical Issues in America” competition at UCSB in 2006. Her current research and teaching focuses on the ways in which literature and critical theory can contribute to an exploration of trauma, of human rights and their violations, and to a meaningful reflection on concepts whose definitions have become, in the contemporary context, more and more uncertain, including the concepts of “the human,” “democracy,” “justice,” “rights.”

For more information on the "Torture and the Future" project, please visit: http://www.complit.ucsb.edu/projects/tortureandthefuture/index.html

Recent and upcoming graduate courses include “Ethics and Psychoanalysis,” “Deconstructions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of Religion,” “German Judaism in Literature and Philosophy,” “Speech-Thinking / Sprach-Denken: Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin,” and “Humanities and Human Rights in Times of Torture.”