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Klaus Mladek is Associate Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on 18th through 20th-century literature, political theory, philosophy, theater, and psychoanalysis. In the book A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt (Princeton University Press 2023), he and George Edmondson explore an affirmative mode of melancholic politics. He edited Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis (Duke University Press 2017) with George Edmondson, a collection about the collapse and resurgence of the sovereign exception in our times. He is also the editor of Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution (Palgrave 2007) and the author of Stages of Justice: Encounters of Politics, Theater and Philosophy from Socrates to Arendt (forthcoming with Northwestern University Press). In the collection In the Wake of the Plague: Eros and Mourning (in process), he and James Godley investigate the political, mental and social life in the aftermath of Covid-19. He is currently completing a monograph Walter Benjamin's Demons: Revolution and the Idea of Justice. Recent articles and book chapters are on Kafka and the theater, on conspiracy theory, justice and conflict, on populism, the politics of crisis, torture and shame, on melancholic politics, on the American jury system and on the idea of justice in Walter Benjamin. Books in progress are on the interlacement of justice and conflict (stasis) since Homer's Iliad and Plato's Republic as well as a study entitled Criminal Subjects: Politics vs. Police in Literature and Philosophy after Kant. He has received research grants from the NEH, the ACLS, the Humboldt Foundation, the Center for German and European Studies and the University of California Psychoanalytic Consortium.
A Politics of Melancholia: Plato to Arendt (Princeton University Press, 2023, with George Edmondson).
In the Wake of the Plague: Eros and Mourning, eds. Klaus Mladek and James Godley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming).
"Gerechtigkeit," in Enzyklopädie der Genauigkeit, eds. Markus Krajewski, Antonia von Schöning & Mario Wimmer (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press & Wallstein, 2021), 184-197.
In English We Trust: Can We Be Global Citizens Without Knowing Foreign Languages? (The Hill, 4/4/19) (with Kristin O'Rourke)
Whatever Happened to Justice for All? (Los Angeles Review of Books, 1/11/18)
Why justice is more important than the rule of law (The Conversation, 12/19/17)
Reclaiming the Populist Moment (Alternet, 10/9/17)
Merkel Won, So Why Aren't Germans Celebrating? (Cognoscenti, 9/27/17)
Gorsuch and the Crisis of Poetic Justice (The Huffington Post, 5/5/17)
"Twelve Theses on Populism," Gespenster des Wissens, eds. Ute Holl, Claus Pias & Burkhardt Wolf (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2017), 261-270.
"Natural History: Towards a Politics of Crisis" (with G. Edmondson), in Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, eds. George Edmondson & Klaus Mladek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 30-68.
"Introduction: Sovereignty Crises" (with G. Edmondson), in Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, eds. George Edmondson & Klaus Mladek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 9-27.
Walter Benjamin's Demons: Revolution and the Idea of Justice
Criminal Subjects: Politics vs. Police in Literature and Philosophy after Kant