Jens Kruse

Jens Kruse joined the Wellesley College faculty in 1983 and became Associate Professor of German in 1990. He teaches both German language and literature on all levels of the curriculum and has served repeatedly as chair of the German Department and Coordinator of Foreign Language Chairs. His particular teaching interests are late 18th- and early 19th-century literature, especially the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and 20th-century literature, especially the works of Franz Kafka and Martin Walser. He has also taught extradepartmental courses such as "Classic Western Texts in Contemporary Perspective” and “Imaginary Crimes and Courts: the Law in Literature.” In 1992, Mr. Kruse was appointed Associate Dean of the College, a position in which he served until 1999.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Kruse was educated in Germany as well as in the United States. He received the M.A. degree in Comparative Literature from Indiana University in Bloomington in 1971 and took the Staatsexamen at the University of Hamburg in 1974. He received the Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California in Los Angeles in 1982.

Mr. Kruse's research interests reflect his teaching interests. He is the author of the book Der Tanz der Zeichen: Poetische Struktur und Geschichte in Goethe's Faust II and numerous articles on Goethe, Franz Kafka, and Martin Walser. A common current in all of Mr. Kruse’s scholarly work is the attempt to trace the connections between cultural artifacts and the historical structures that shape them and are in turn informed by them. An example of this is Mr. Kruse’s current book project entitled “Goethe”: Biography of a Fiction. Here, Kruse uses the fictional representations of Goethe in novels and novellas between 1832 and the present to trace that writer’s unparalleled significance for the cultural identity of the German nation.

In his most recent book, Tortured Enlightenment. Writing and Reading in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” written mostly for the general reader in the form of letters to his family, Mr. Kruse examines this horrifying novella of the year 1914 for instructions on how best to read Kafka.

Mr. Kruse continues to be very active in the service of Wellesley College. He has recently served on the President’s 2015 Commission, has been appointed Acting Chair of the Italian Department, elected to the Committee on Faculty Appointments, and elected to the Presidential Search Committee.

.

***

Profile last updated: 8/06