Joachim Küpper

Joachim Küpper (born 1952) is a professor of romance studies and comparative literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. Küpper has published on authors from various periods, including Homer, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Alessandro Manzoni, Balzac, Flaubert, Theodor Fontane, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In addition, he works on problems of literary theory and intellectual history.^[1] He is the author of eight monographs and approximately 100 articles, as well as the editor of numerous volumes and scholarly journals.^[2]

After studying romance literatures and history in Bochum, Toulouse and Paris, Küpper began working as assistant professor at the Institute for Romance Philology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1977. Following upon his doctoral dissertation (1980) and his habilitation (1987), he became a full professor of romance studies at the University of Wuppertal in 1989. In 2009 he switched to the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has since been employed as professor of romance studies and comparative literature, having declined offers from numerous other universities in Germany such as the universities of Tübingen, Bonn and Cologne.

In 1987, Küpper was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis, and in 2001 the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. In 2007, he established the first center for the humanities in Germany, the Dahlem Humanities Center, at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2016, Küpper acted as principal researcher of an Advanced Grant Project under the auspices of the European Research Council (ERC). The project was dedicated to the development of a “network theory” of culture.^[3] The monograph resulting from the project, written by Küpper, was published in 2018 as The Cultural Net.^[4] Küpper has lectured at universities worldwide, including Princeton University, UCLA, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the National Research University HSE in Moscow, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For many years, he was a visiting associate professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, as well as a Directeur de recherche invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.^[2]