Jonathan M. Hess

Jonathan M. Hess (May 30, 1965 – April 9, 2018) was an American

Hess earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University, then pursued a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University before completing his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation was titled “Aesthetic States: The Political Investments of Aesthetic Autonomy” (1993) and was completed under the direction of Liliane Weissberg.

He joined the

Hess died suddenly on April 9, 2018.[3] Professor Hess is survived by his wife and three children.

The Jonathan M. Hess Term Professorship at the University of North Carolina was established in honor of him.^[4]

Bibliography

Authored works

• Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Wayne State University Press, 1999)
• Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (Yale University Press, 2002)
• Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Stanford University Press, 2010)
• Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

Edited works

• Literary Studies and the Pursuits of Reading (Camden House, 2012)
• Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Articles (selection)

• "Ludwig Börne's Visit to the Anatomical Cabinet: The Writing of Jewish Emancipation." New German Critique 55 (1992): 105-126.
• "Wordsworth's aesthetic state: the poetics of liberty." Studies in romanticism (1994): 3-29.
• "Sugar Island Jews? Jewish Colonialism and the Rhetoric of" Civic Improvement" in Eighteenth-Century Germany." Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 92-100.
• "Fictions of a German-Jewish Public: Ludwig Jacobowski's" Werther the Jew" and Its Readers." Jewish social studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 202-230.
• "Leopold Kompert and the work of Nostalgia: the cultural capital of German Jewish ghetto fiction." The Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 576-615.
• "Moses Mendelssohn and the Polemics of History." In Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness, pp. 1-27. Brill, 2007.
• "Beyond subversion: German Jewry and the poetics of middlebrow culture." The German Quarterly 82, no. 3 (2009): 316-335.
• Off to America and back again, or Judah Touro and other products of the German Jewish imagination." Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19, no. 2 (2013): 1-23.

References