PhD (University of California, Berkeley)

Reitter’s scholarship focuses primarily on two areas: German-Jewish culture and the history of higher education. Of particular concern in both cases have been the links between intellectual and institutional history, the relationship of cultural crisis and cultural innovation, and the effects of technological change on humanistic culture. A practicing translator, Reitter is also interested in the field of translation studies. He is the author of four books. The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U of Chicago Press, 2008), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton UP, 2012), and Bambi’s Jewish Roots: Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (U of Chicago Press, 2021), which, coauthored with Chad Wellmon, considers how the factors and processes that allowed the modern humanities to flourish have at the same time made life difficult for the humanities. While the story the book tells is set mostly in nineteenth-century Germany, it engages vigorously with debates about the state of the humanities in our own day. Reitter’s articles and essays have appeared in an array of venues, ranging from Representations, American Imago, Jewish Social Studies, and the Leo Baeck Yearbook to Harper’s Magazine, the TLS, The Nation, the LA Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Jewish Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The Hedgehog Review.

Reitter has worked collaboratively on a number of editions, including The Kraus Project (FSG, 2013), with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (New York Review of Books Classics series, 2015), with Chad Wellmon, The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook (U of Chicago Press, 2017), with Louis Menand and Chad Wellmon, and The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon (Princeton University Press, 2019, finalist for a National Jewish Book Award), with Abraham Socher and Yitzhak Melamed. Together with Chad Wellmon, he produced a new English edition of Max Weber’s famous vocation lectures, published in the New York Review of Books Classics series in 2020. With Paul North, he put out an annotated English edition of Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1), which includes his own new translation of the text (Princeton UP, 2024). Reitter is, in addition, a member of the editorial boards of Nexus: Essays in German-Jewish Studies and American Imago.

His research has been supported by fellowships from the German Literature Archive (DLA) in Marbach, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish Studies in Leipzig, the Lion Feuchtwanger Archive at USC, and the American Academy in Berlin.

At Ohio State, Reitter teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses, on topics ranging from representations of the Holocaust in German literature and film to theories of translation. He has served as a visiting professor at the Freie Uni in Berlin, Leibniz University in Hanover, the University of Bonn, and Yale University, where he was the Goldsmith Foundation Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies in the spring of 2025.

As director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State (2012-2017), Reitter developed and launched a number of programs, among which were three lecture series, a faculty-led writing group for undergraduates working on a thesis, two outreach courses (this entailed partnering with Columbus’s CATCH Court program for survivors of human trafficking), and a pilot version of the Institute’s faculty working groups.

Select Publications

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Karl Marx (Author), Paul North (Editor), Paul Reitter (Editor/Translator).

“Why Retranslation Matters,” Los Angeles Review of Books (September 19, 2024). 

With Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon (Princeton University Press, 2019) by Solomon Maimon (Author), Abraham Socher and Yitzhak Melamed (Editors), Paul Reitter (Translator).

"The Business of Learning," New York Review of Books (February 22, 2018) 30-33.

With Chad Wellmon, "Melancholy Mandarins: Bloom, Weber, and Moral Education," The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2017) 45-62.