Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Biography

Dr. Isaac Tubb received his Ph.D. in the fall of 2008 from the University of 
California, Davis, and studied at the German universities of Göttingen, Mainz, 
and Düsseldorf. While completing his dissertation he taught at the University of 
California, Santa Barbara. Upon the completion of the dissertation, he accepted a position as lecturer at UCSB before coming to the University of Illinois. His research and teaching interests are rooted in an engagement with the German intellectual tradition from the Enlightenment to the present. His dissertation, entitled “Illness and Insight: Melancholic 
Encounters With(in) History in Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter Benjamin, and Peter 
Handke,” explores the methodological and historical development of a 
specifically modern narrativity of melancholia anchored in a Benjaminian notion of contemplation and its performative expression in literary language. 
Benjamin’s sensitivity to figurative language and to how it presents the problem 
of history emerges as the red thread that runs through the project, refracting the aesthetico-philosophical concerns of both Rilke and Handke in a world they 
perceive as decidedly alienating. Besides preparing a book manuscript from his dissertation, Isaac Tubb is currently working on a project concerning the 
phenomenon of the “encounter” in the works of Rainer Maria Rilke.