Professor Paul Reitter, promoted to Full Professor last year, will be delivering his inaugural lecture on January 21. He will be speaking on “Bambi’s Jewish Roots.” The lecture will reconstruct the complex and idiosyncratic Zionist commitments of the Viennese journalist, novelist, playwright and pornographer Felix Salten, tracing them through Salten’s most famous book, Bambi (1923).

Professor Reitter is an internationally recognized scholar whose work has focused on German-Jewish relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been teaching at Ohio State since 2000. His major monograph publications are The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Chicago, 2008) and On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton, 2012). He has edited several volumes, including a selection of writings by Karl Kraus, which he produced jointly with the noted American novelist Jonathan Franzen.

Since 2012 Professor Reitter has served as the Director of Ohio State’s Humanities Institute.