Peter Makhlouf

Biography

I studied Comparative Literature and Germanistik in Berlin and Princeton, where I taught until 2025. My research spans topics ancient, medieval and modern and focuses primarily on the German, Arabic, and classical traditions. I have published widely across these fields, but in addition to my scholarly writings more narrowly conceived, I have often written for public fora including Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jewish Currents, boundary2online and Marginalia, among others.

Recent talks and articles of mine have been devoted to querying the chronopolitics of catastrophe at the intersection of Palestinian literature and thought and the German-Jewish tradition. This work continues my longstanding commitment to the study of culture as both a site for the elaboration of imperial rule and a heterodox archive of anticolonial resistance. Such themes lie at the core of the book I am currently completing—Declinations: Stefan George’s Secret Empire—which centers on the reception of late Roman decadence among the poets, scholars, and artists in the circle around Stefan George from the 1890s through to the 1950s. Declinations explores how tropes of Roman imperium and downfall emerged from a maelstrom of radical aesthetic experiments, transgressive sexual groupings, and the traumas of the Great War, while responding in complex ways to the shifting fates of German empire.

I am the happy beneficiary of a Jesuit education—with an enduring debt to a Catholic social thought emergent from liberation theology. It has been a unique privilege to join a university so committed to humanistic inquiry animated by a catholicity of vision. I am here reminded daily of Erich Auerbach's dictum—inspired by Hugo of St. Victor and translated by Edward Said–when he sought to articulate the grounds and promise of comparative literary study: "our philological home is the earth."