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Dr. Nicholas Germana

Professor
History
Morrison Hall 130 • M/S 1301
603-358-2362

Nicholas Germana received his Ph.D. from Boston College in 2006. Dr. Germana's scholarly work to date has focused on German nationalism and German orientalism. He teaches various courses on European intellectual history and the history of women in Europe. His first book, "The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity," was published in 2009 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

His second book, "The Anxiety of Autonomy and the Aesthetics of German Orientalism" (Camden House, 2017) explores the reception of Indian and Chinese philosophies and religions in the tradition of German thought from Immanuel Kant to G.W.F. Hegel, and locates the origins of this orientalist discourse in the problem of anxiety that pervades Kant's and Hegel's constructions of modern, Western, male rationality.

"A new history of Kantian and post-Kantian German philosophy. This is an important book...Nicholas Germana [breaks] new ground by illuminating the buried history of orientalism in German philosophy between Kant and Hegel. That is a considerable achievement." Joachim Whaley, JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES

Since 2009, he has published several articles and essays including:

“The Beauty of Enervation: Woman India, and the Anxiety of System in Hegel’s Philosophy,” German Studies Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, February 2011

“India and Hegel’s ‘Scientific Method’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit”, in Kindred Spirits: Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, eds. Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander, Douglas McGetchin (Routledge, 2013)

“Equality without Freedom: The Familial Constitution of China in Hegel’s Philosophy of History”, in China and Germany: Transcultural, Historical and Political Encounters from the Enlightenment to the 21st Century (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)

“The Colossal and Grotesque: The Gendered Aesthetics of German Orientalism”, in Gendered German Asian Encounters – Transnational Perspectives, 1800-2000 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017)

“Revisiting ‘Hegel and Haiti’: Postcolonial Readings of the Lord/Bondsman Dialectic”, in Creolizing Hegel (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017)

"The Creuzerstreit and Hegel's Philosophy of History", Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming)

Dr. Germana's plans for future work include a biography of Immanuel Kant for a non-academic audience.

Dr. Germana is the director of the History Honors Program.

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