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

Biography

Laurie Johnson works on eighteenth- through twenty-first-century intellectual history, literature, philosophy, and culture, with particular emphasis on German Romanticism and its afterlife. She earned the B.A. from Northwestern University and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. While completing her Ph.D. she taught at St. Louis Community College and at the College of Wooster. She has studied or conducted research at the universities of Cologne, Regensburg, and Tübingen as well as at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. She has been a member of the faculty at Vanderbilt University as well as at the University of Illinois, where she joined the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2001.

Her book entitled The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism (Niemeyer, 2002) examines representations of memory and remembering in the 1790s, and argues that Romantic theories of memory reflect the insights not only of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and critical philosophy, but of contemporary psychology and of natural science.

Her book entitled Aesthetic Anxiety (Rodopi, 2010) argues for the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity by analyzing uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film. Johnson explores ways in which anxiety illuminates the mind-body problem in German cultural products from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, and emphasizes Romanticism’s function as an engine of modernity.

A review of Aesthetic Anxiety in literaturkritik.de is available here:
http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=15034

Another review of Aesthetic Anxiety has appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of The German Quarterly (85.2), pp. 219-221.

Johnson’s current project, The New German Romanticism in the Films of Werner Herzog, continues to pursue the rediscovery of alternate trajectories of German Romanticism—in film and in Herzog’s long career in particular. Johnson addresses the history of Herzog’s production from Germany to Los Angeles, and focuses on representations of space/landscape and on alterity in his feature and documentary films.

Johnson is also editing a volume of new psychoanalytic readings of folk and fairy tales (Freud and the Fairy Tale: New Approaches to Very Old Stories), working on essays on Schelling’s Romanticism and on William Gibson’s science fiction, and working on a contribution to a volume on teaching at Illinois.

Johnson has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Romantic and Idealist philosophy and literature, on literary and cultural theory and criticism, on power and knowledge in the Western cultural tradition, and on various other aspects of literature and culture from 850 to the present.

In 2007, Laurie Johnson was named Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois. This award recognizes exceptional research and teaching during the tenure probation period.

Johnson was named James A. Hagan Teaching Fellow in 2006-2007. She received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

More information on Johnson's research and teaching is available at the link "Visit Website," above.

Courses Taught

• Freud, Nietzsche, Kafka
• Modern Critical Theory: An Advanced Introduction
• German Cultural History (Middle Ages to the Present)
• The Dark Side of Modernity
• The Grimms’ Fairy Tales in Their European Context
• German Idealism and Romanticism Conversation
• Introduction to German Literature: Classicism to Postmodernism
• Advanced German Composition and Conversation