After close to four decades at The Ohio State University, Bernd Fischer, professor of German, will retire this year. He chaired the department from the end of the 20th century into the beginning of the 21st, from 1996-2008 and then served as Interim Chair from 2012-2014. 

Retirement, however, does not mean that his work will be ending. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled, Ästhetik der Anerkennung: Von Fichte bis Kafka. 

Professor Fischer has advised 10 Master’s students and 15 Doctoral students at Ohio State and has served as a member on over 20 master’s and 50 doctoral student committees. 

He is an established Kleist scholar and his research and teaching specializations include early nineteenth-century German literature, culture, and intellectual history; National imaginaries and Transculturality; German-Jewish Thought around 1800; and Aesthetics of Recognition. 

His books include: Germanistik zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Akten des XIII. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Shanghai 2015. Vol. 11 (co-ed., 2018), Transcultural Literary Studies: Politics, Theory, and Analysis. Special Issue of Humanities (ed., 2017), Ein anderer Blick: Saul Aschers politische Schriften (2016), Transcultural Literary Studies. Special Issue of Humanities (ed., 2016), Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (ed. with May Mergenthaler, 2015), Kleist and Modernity (ed. with Tim Mehigan, 2011), Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture. Essays to Honor Alexander Stephan (ed. with Helen Fehervary, 2007), A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (ed., 2010/2003), Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herder, Fichte, Kleist. Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten (1995), Christoph Hein: Drama und Prosa im letzten Jahrzehnt der DDR (1990), Neue Tendenzen der Arnimforschung: Interpretation, Biographie, Edition, mit neuen Dokumenten (ed. with Roswitha Burwick, 1990), Ironische Metaphysik: Die Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists (1988), Kabale und Liebe: Skepsis und Melodrama in Schillers bürgerlichem Trauerspiel (1987), and Literatur und Politik: Die 'Novellensammlung von 1812' und das 'Landhausleben' von Achim von Arnim (1983). 

We all wish him well as he continues to enrich the field of German Studies for many years to come.