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Simon Richter: Class of 1942 Term Professor

caption: Simon RichterPenn Provost Wendell Pritchett and Vice Provost for Faculty Anita Allen announced the appointment of Simon Richter as Class of 1942 Term Professor, effective July 1, 2018.

The Class of 1942, at its 50th reunion, established an endowed term chair to recognize Penn faculty members who have made significant contributions to both scholarship and undergraduate teaching. The chair rotates every five years among Penn’s four undergraduate schools (Arts & Sciences, Engineering & Applied Science, Nursing, and Wharton).

Dr. Richter is a professor of Germanic languages and literatures, member of the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature and Religious Studies, fellow of the Institute of Urban Research, and an affiliate of the Programs in Cinema Studies, Environmental Humanities and Women’s Studies. He has taught at Penn since 1998 and in 2008 received the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching honor in the School of Arts & Sciences (Almanac April 22, 2008).

A specialist in Goethe and the late-18th and early-19th centuries, he is the author of Women, Pleasure, Film: What Lolas Want; Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment; Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe; and numerous articles and book chapters, as well as an editor of three books and six editions of the annual Goethe Yearbook.

At Penn, he has taught innovative interdisciplinary courses, including Water Worlds: Cultural Responses to Sea Level Rise and Catastrophic Flooding and a hybrid online/study abroad course, Comparative Cultures of Sustainability in Germany and the Netherlands that includes an intensive study visit to Berlin and Rotterdam.

He earned a PhD (1990) in German from the Johns Hopkins University, an MA (1983) in comparative literature from the University of Toronto, and a BA (1981) in independent studies from the University of Georgia.

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