Ken Calhoon received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of California, Irvine. He taught for two years at Haverford and Bryn Mawr colleges before joining Oregon’s faculty in 1987. He spent academic year 1994-95 at the University of Bonn as a Humboldt Fellow. He has served as director of Oregon’s Program in Comparative Literature and acting director of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.

He is author of Fatherland: Novalis, Freud, and the Discipline of Romance (Wayne State, 1992) and editor of Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema (Wayne State, 2001). Publications include: “The Detective and the Witch: The Aesthetic Prehistory of Detection in Conan Doyle and Fontane” (Comparative Literature 1996); “Emil Jannings, Falstaff, and the Spectacle of the Body Natural” (Modern Language Quarterly 1997); “Personal Effects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography” (Modern Language Notes 1998); “Alchemies of Distraction in James’s Portrait of a Lady and Fontane’s Effi Briest” (arcadia 1999); “Blind Gestures: Chaplin, Diderot, Lessing” (Modern Language Notes 2000); “The Eye of the Panther: Rilke and the Machine of Cinema” (Comparative Literature 2000); “The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg” (Deutsche Vierteljarhrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 2001); “Reading and the Art of Leisure in Mörike’s ‘Wald-Idylle’” (Modern Language Notes 2001); “F. W. Murnau, C. D. Friedrich and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator,” (Modern Language Notes 2005). He has contributions on Mörike and Fontane in The New History of German Literature (Harvard 2005). Another essay, “Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey,” is forthcoming. Professor Calhoon recently spoke at a conference entitled Landschaftsgänge — Bewusstseinslandschaften: Zur Kulturgeschichte und Poetik des Spaziergangs , held on the Museuminsel Hombroich.

His research and teaching interests range from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries with particular emphasis on drama, early cinema, aesthetics, and the history of manners. His current project, The Virtue of Things, addresses contradictions surrounding the emergence of anti-baroque sensibilities in eighteenth-century culture and criticism.