Martin Woessner, Ph.D.

Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History & Society at The City College of New York's Center for Worker Education (CUNY). Martin received his BA in European history and philosophy from the University of San Francisco in 1999, and his PhD in modern intellectual history from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2006.  He teaches interdisciplinary courses in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels—courses such as "The Age of Extremes," "The History of Human Rights," "Genocide in the Twentieth Century," "Capitalism and Anti-capitalism from Adam Smith to Slavoj Zizek," "Inventing the Americas," "Religion in the Americas," and "Weimar in America." Martin's first book examines the American reception of the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.  It covers a wide range of topics in philosophy, theology, and contemporary theory.  His current research focuses on transnational intellectual and cultural history in the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on the topics of genocide and human rights. His interdisciplinary work has led to essays and articles on the South African novelist J.M Coetzee, the English thinkers Iris Murdoch and Michael Oakeshott, the intellectual history of human rights, and, most recently, the American filmmaker Terrence Malick.  As the director of the Frances S. Patai Program at CWE, Martin oversees courses and an annual lecture series devoted to a wide range of themes in Holocaust, genocide, an human rights studies.  Martin has received fellowships from the Center for Humanities as well as the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics—both at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2004 he was the recipient of a Charlotte Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, and in May 2011 he received the Feliks Gross Endowment Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences. 

BA European History and Philosophy, University of San Francisco, 1999

PhD Modern Intellectual History, City University of New York, 2006

• Weimar in America (MA)
• Religion in the Americas (MA)
• Inventing the Americas (MA)
  
• Capitalism and Anti-capitalism from Adam Smith to Slavoj Zizek
  
• History of Women, War, and Peace (Patai Program)
  
• Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Patai Program)
• History of Human Rights (Patai Program)
• The Age of Extremes: European Intellectual and Cultural History between Calamity and Prosperity
  
• The Urban Experience: Europe in the Twentieth Century
• Resistance and Collaboration in the Second World War (Patai Program)
• Core Social Science II
  

 Check out *HEIDEGGER IN AMERICA*

https://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521518376

[Reviewed in La Quinzaine Litteraire; Theological Studies; Journal of American Studies; Philosophy in Review; American Historical Review; Radical Philosophy; Human Studies; Modern Intellectual History; Common Knowledge, Irish Journal of American Studies; German History]

I am currently working on two, transnational, interdisciplinary book projects.  The first--The Literary Turn: The Moral Imaginations of Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty--carries forward the story of Heidegger in America.  It examines the recent history of American philosophy, but it is also a case-study in the evolution of "interdisciplinary inquiry."  The second project examines the historical films of philosopher-turned-filmmaker Terrence Malick.  In addition to these projects, a number of forthcoming article-length pieces and reviews are listed below.  

"What is Heideggerian Cinema?  Film, Philosophy, and Cultural Mobility" New German Critique 38 (Summer 2011): 129-157.

"Reconsidering the Slaughter Bench of History: Genocide, Theodicy, and the Philosophy of History," Journal of Genocide Research 13:1-2 (March-June 2011): 83-102.

 "Angst across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain" forthcoming in Robert Bernasconi and Jonathan Judaken, eds., Situating Existentialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 145-179.

Heidegger in America (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011). 

"Coetzee's Critique of Reason," in Anton Leist and Peter Singer, eds., J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 2010), 223-247.  [Reviewed in TLS 23 February 2011] 

"A New Ontology for the Era of the New Economy: On Edward W. Soja's Seeking Spatial Justice," City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 14:6 (December 2010): 601-603.

"Rescuing the 'Right to the City'," City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 13:4 (December 2009): 474-475. 

"American Intellectual and Cultural History in the Age of Globalization," Intellectual News: Review of the international society for intellectual history 15 (Winter 2005): 24-33. 

"Daniel Libeskind: From the End of Architecture to the Space of Memory," in Gary Backhaus and John Murungi, eds., Lived Topographies: and their Mediating Forces (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005), 145-160.  

"J. Glenn Gray: Philosopher, Translator (of Heidegger), and Warrior," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy XL:3 (Summer 2004): 487-512. 

"Ethics, Architecture, and Heidegger: "Building Dwelling Thinking" in an American Context," City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 7:1 (April 2003): 23-44.

Forthcoming articles and reviews:

Review of History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck by Niklas Olsen, forthcoming in the American Historical Review.

Review of Woman-Killing in Juarez: Theodicy at the Border by Rafael Luevano, forthcoming in Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics.

"Hermeneutic Communism: Left Heideggerianism's Last Hope?" in Silvia Mazzini, ed., Renewing Communism through Hermeneutics? (Continuum, 2013).

"Provincializing Human Rights? The Heideggerian Legacy from Charles Malik to Dipesh Chakrabarty" forthcoming in Jose Manuel Barreto, ed., Human Rights from a Third-World Perspective (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012).