After the High/Low Debate

<p>Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). He chaired the Department of Germanic Languages from 1986-92 and again as of 2005. He is one of the founding editors of <i>New German Critique</i>, the leading journal of German Studies in the United States (1974-) and he serves on the editorial boards of <i>October</i>, <i>Constellations</i>, <i>Germanic Review</i>, <i>Transit</i>, <i>Key Words </i>(UK), and <i>Critical Space</i> (Tokyo). In 2005, he won Columbia’s coveted Mark van Doren teaching award. His research and teaching focus on 18th-20th-century German literature and culture, international modernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, postmodernism, cultural memory of historical trauma in transnational contexts, and, most recently, urban culture and globalization.</p> <p>Huyssen has published widely in German and English and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Japanese and Chinese. His books include <i>Drama des Sturm und Drang</i> (1980), <i>After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism</i> (1986), <i>Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels</i> (ed. with Klaus Scherpe, 1986), <i>Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism</i> (ed. with David Bathrick, 1989), <i>Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia</i> (1995), <i>Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory</i> (2003), and the forthcoming edited volume on the culture of non-Western cities entitled <i>Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World</i> (2008).</p> <p>In 1999, Andreas Huyssen was invited to give a lecture at MACBA in the context of the seminar <em>Towards a high popular culture</em>. This lecture was entitled “Present Pasts: After the High/Low Debate.”</p>