Russell Berman

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, appointed in the departments of German Studies and Comparative Literature. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1979 and has received many awards, including a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Berlin, the best book award from the German Studies Association, and in 1997 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Service Cross) of the Federal Republic of Germany. He received Stanford's Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching (2013) and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2014). In 2011, he  was the President of the Modern Language Association (2011), he served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State (2019-2020), as a member of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, and a member of the National Humanities Council. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. For many years he served as the Editor of the journal Telos, a quarterly journal of critical theory. At Stanford he has served in many administrative capacities, including chair of German Studies and Comparative Literature, associate dean, director of the Overseas Studies Programs, director of Introduction to the Humanities and of Stanford Introductory Studies, and he was elected chair of the Senate of the Academic Council (2014-15). He is now director of the department of Comparative Literature. His interests include literature and culture, both from German-speaking Europe as well as the Middle East; international relations and foreign policy; cultural theory; religion and culture.