Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact Information:

• Address: 2090 FLB, MC-178, 707 S. Mathews Ave.
• Telephone: (217) 265-4037
• Email: lruthjoh@illinois.edu
• Visit Website

Biography

Laurie Johnson’s research and teaching focus on eighteenth- through twentieth-century intellectual history, literature, philosophy, and culture. She earned the B.A. from Northwestern University and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. While completing her Ph.D. she taught at St. Louis Community College and at the College of Wooster (Ohio). She has studied or conducted research at the universities of Cologne, Regensburg, and Tübingen as well as at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. After spending four years in a tenure-track position at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Johnson joined the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Illinois in 2001.

Johnson's research to date has focused on intersections of literary, philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic discourses, in German Romanticism and in the "long" nineteenth century (approx. 1780-1930). Her book entitled The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism (Niemeyer, 2002) treats representations of memory and remembering in the philosophically seminal 1790's, and argues that Romantic theories of memory reflect the influence not only of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and critical philosophy, but of contemporary psychology and of natural science--and, in particular, of debates about the relationship between body and mind.

Her second book, entitled Aesthetic Anxiety (forthcoming with Rodopi Press), analyzes uncanny repetition in different cultural disciplines (psychology, literature, philosophy, and film), and attempts thereby to produce a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The repetitive and often horrible, but sometimes simultaneously enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state, and Aesthetic Anxiety also explores ways in which anxiety illuminates the mind-body problem in German cultural products from the late eighteenth through twentieth centuries.

Johnson has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Romantic and Idealist philosophy and literature, on literary and cultural theory and criticism, on power and knowledge in the Western cultural tradition, and on various other aspects of literature and culture from 850 to the present.

In January 2007, Laurie Johnson was named Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences. This award recognizes exceptional research and teaching during the tenure probation period.

Johnson was named the James A. Hagan Teaching Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for 2006-2007.

Publications

Courses Taught

• Modern Critical Theory: An Advanced Introduction
• German Cultural History (Middle Ages to the Present)
• The Dark Side of Modernity
• The Grimms’ Fairy Tales in Their European Context
• German Idealism and Romanticism Conversation
• Introduction to German Literature: Classicism to Postmodernism
• Advanced German Composition and Conversation