About

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University, holding positions in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French & Italian, with courtesy affiliations in Iberian and Latin American Cultures, German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His scholarly focus includes the histories of national literatures in Romance languages, particularly French, Spanish, and Brazilian, as well as German literature. He also teaches and writes about the western philosophical tradition, emphasizing non-analytic philosophy, especially French and German texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gumbrecht aims to analyze and understand forms of aesthetic experience and everyday culture in the 21st century. Over the past forty years, he has published more than two thousand texts, translated into over twenty languages. He has a significant presence as a public intellectual in Europe and South America and has been recognized with twelve Honorary Doctorates from universities across Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Russia, and Georgia, the most recent from Leuphana Universität Lüneburg in 2017. Gumbrecht has held numerous visiting professorships at institutions such as the Collège de France, University of Lisbon, University of Manchester, and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, among others. In spring 2017, he was a Martin Buber Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he recently taught at Stanford's Bing Overseas Program in Santiago, Chile. Currently, he is working on a book project titled 'A Phenomenology of the Human Voice'.

Research topics

• Computer Security
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Meteorology
• Geography
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Potencial de uma trilha mental. No espólio do teórico da literatura Wolfgang Iser

  Eutomia · 2025-02-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  O presente ensaio apresenta o último desenvolvimento da obra do teórico da literatura alemão Wolfgang Iser, explorando em seu espólio as anotações acerca do conceito de “emergência”. Apenas esboçado pelo autor nos últimos anos de sua produção, ressalta-se seu diálogo tenso com a filosofia da história hegeliana, destacando-se pelo conceito em elaboração uma concepção de história que, motivada pela criatividade potencial do humano, não pode ser objeto de prognóstico, tão somente de descrição.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• „Phänomenologie der Stimme“

  2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Encarnación, empatía, rituales

  Historia y Grafía · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A partir de una concepción diferente, tanto de Fukuyama como de sus críticos, acerca del llamado “fin de la Historia”, se plantean dos formas de concebir este “fin”. En primer lugar, que la visión histórica del mundo ha perdido su anterior centralidad institucional en el espacio de lo cotidiano, y, en segundo, que la disciplina requiere una profunda revisión de sus premisas, por lo que ha de redefinir sus potenciales funciones, y finalmente, sustituirse a sí misma. Ante la emergencia de un nuevo “cronotopo” [o "construcción social de tiempo"], que conduciría a un concepto de “encarnación” del pasado, se proponen nuevas aproximaciones que enfrenten algunas deficiencias y problemas de nuestro presente.

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• Frontmatter

  2023-06-05

  book-chapterOpen access
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• Expansive Energy: An Alternative Portrait of Denis Diderot

  New Literary History · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Historians of the Enlightenment are stymied by Denis Diderot's cloven polymathy. An insoluble dilemma arises between, on one hand, the amazing range of interests attested in his roles as both editor and contributor for the Encyclopédie and, on the other hand, his incorrigible dilettantism, in the centrifugal and often inconclusive pursuit of whatever topic came his way. We will do better to relinquish synthesis and highlight instead the multiplicity and versatility of Diderot's productive exuberance as such. We can then see how, rather than build arguments, he metabolized ideas into designs exhibiting a constantly increasing complexity that matched his inexhaustible energy. We can also appreciate his lifelong habit of writing in response to outside, and more or less random, prompts and assignments. An accidental polymath, Diderot preferred the pursuit of a train of thought over disciplined conclusiveness: witness his preference for dialogue over more integrative forms driven by argumentative power. A stranger to disciplinary methodology, he would nowadays be a journalist, not an academic.

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• Hugo Kuhn (1909–1978)

  Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte · 2023-05-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Will the 21st Century be Aristotelian?

  LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2022-10-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This text focuses on the discursive tradition that may be called Cultural Critique and on the dislocations in some fundamental epistemological structures. It presents changes in the working conditions within the Humanities in our electronic present and, inspired by themes from Heidegger's late writings, it seeks to condense the judgements previously formulated in a critique of the present. We also point out to a series of current symptoms that may serve as evidence to consolidate the hope in an Aristotelian future.

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• Über den Stil der „Forschungsgruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik“

  Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie. Sonderheft · 2022-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Keine griffige Formel kann den Status der von 1963 bis 1994 aktiven „Forschungsgruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik“ für die Arbeit der Geisteswissenschaften heute, ein gutes Vierteljahrhundert nach ihrer abschließenden Tagung, erfassen. Die Grenzen des akademischen Ursprungsmilieus hat der Ruf des Unternehmens wohl nie überschritten und blieb damit dem Selbstverständnis (eher als dem Ehrgeiz) seiner Protagonisten treu.

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• Flaubert’s Landscapes

  Compendium Journal of Comparative Studies = Revista de Estudos Comparatistas · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  From the Archive is a special section of Compendium dedicated to republishing texts from the Centre for Comparative Studies’ two-decade history of academic publishing in book form, giving them a new visibility and easier international outreach online. The choice of book chapters and articles to include in this section is based on the way they directly or indirectly communicate with the Issue, thus reconnecting previous and present debates on a common topic. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s “Flaubert’s Landscapes” was originally published in Helena Carvalhão Buescu, João Ferreira Duarte and Fátima Fernandes da Silva, eds. (2004). Corpo e Paisagem Românticos. Lisbon: Centre for Comparative Studies/Colibri, pp. 55-70.

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• A Pioneer on His Work: An Interview with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

  Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures · 2022-12-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this interview, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht visits some of his groundbreaking theoretical contributions, providing an ample archeological gaze towards the emergence of Digital Humanities. The key concepts proposed by Gumbrecht are discussed as well as the new theoretical framework he developed over the past two decades towards an understating of Humanities not primarily focused on the semantic attribution of meaning.

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Frequent coauthors

• David Ε. Wellbery

  University of Chicago

  173 shared

• Renate Lachmann

  University of Konstanz

  171 shared

• Stefan Keppler‐Tasaki

  169 shared

• Anne Eusterschulte

  169 shared

• Andrew Johnston

  169 shared

• Anita Traninger

  169 shared

• Herausgegeben Von

  University of Bern

  169 shared

• Schriftenreihe Der

  University of Cambridge

  169 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Comparative Literature

  University of California, Berkeley

  1983

• M.A., Comparative Literature

  University of California, Berkeley

  1979

• B.A., German Language and Literature

  University of Freiburg

  1976

Awards & honors

• Honorary Doctorates from universities in Canada, Denmark, Ge…
• Most recent Honorary Doctorate from Leuphana Universität Lün…
• Martin Buber Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I…