Barbara Hahn

Barbara Hahn is a Distinguished Professor of German at Vanderbilt University.  Born in Esslingen, Germany, she received a B.A. from the Free University in Berlin in 1973, her Ph.D. from Philips University in Marburg, Massachusetts, in 1976, and her Habilitation from Hamburg University in 1993.  Ms. Hahn served as a research professor at Hamburg University from 1989 to 2004, and as a professor at Princeton University from 1996 to 2004.  She has also taught as a visiting professor at the Catholic University in Lublin from 1987 to 1988, at Viadrina Unviersity in Frankfurt/Oder in 1993, and as a Max-Kade Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1994.  

She has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues in the United States, including Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 in 1999, and Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation in 2005, both exhibited at The Jewish Museum in New York.  She is also the curator of the exhibition “Of Poets, We Expect the Truth”: Hannah Arendt’s Literature, which opened at the Literaturhaus in Berlin in 2006 and traveled to the Lieteraturhaus Frankfurt/Main and to Gasteig, Munich, with current plans to bring the exhibition to the United States.  Ms. Hahn’s published books include Hannah Arendt: Leidenschaften, Menschen und Bücher [Hannah Arendt: Passions, People, and Books] (Berlin Verlag, 2005), and Die Jüden Pallas Athene: Auch eine Theorie der Moderne (Berlin Verlag, 2002; English translation published as The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity by Princeton University Press, 2005).  Ms. Hahn has been awarded a Fellowship to continue work on a book on Hannah Arendt’s literature.