Dr Peter Zusi

Associate Professor

SSEES

UCL SLASH

Joined UCL: 1st Oct 2007

Research summary

My interests range across modern Czech and German literature and culture, theory of modernism and the avant-garde, and the relation between literature and the visual arts, particularly architecture. I have a particular interest in points of contact and conflict between Czech and German culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am co-editor of the journal Central Europe.

Teaching summary

I teach courses on Czech literature from the eighteenth century to the present and contribute to team-taught courses on central and east European literature and cinema. I also teach several literature courses with a comparative, thematically organized scope. I supervise PhD dissertations on Czech and central European literature and culture.

Courses taught

SEEE1006 Literature and Memory (BA)

SEEE2010 Tales of the Unexpected: The Supernatural and Fantastic in Literature, 1800-1930 (BA)

SEESGE18 All Quiet on the Eastern Front: Culture, Politics and Everyday Life in Central & Eastern Europe from Stalin to Present (MA)

SEESGR17 Contemporary Cultural Studies: Between Post-Communism and Post-Modernism (MA)

SEESGE86 Literatures of Rupture: Modernism in Russia and Eastern Europe (MA)

SEESGE95 Literary and Cultural Theory (MA)

Education

University of Chicago: PhD, Comparative Literature | 2001
University of Chicago: MA, Comparative Literature | 1994
Yale University: BA, Literary Studies | 1989

Biography

I grew up in New York City. I studied literature at Yale (BA) and comparative literature and social thought at the University of Chicago (MA, PhD), where my original interest in German literature rapidly expanded to include Czech literature in particular and central European literature in general. My doctoral dissertation examined intellectual and ideological functions of the notion of "historicism" in Czech and German avant-gardes in the interwar period. After defending my dissertation I taught for several years in the Slavic department at Harvard.

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