Thomas S. Hansen

Thomas Hansen is Professor of German. He joined the Wellesley College faculty in 1977 and has served as Chairman of the German Department from 1985–1989, 1995–1997, and has taken over that job again in fall 2004.

Professor Hansen received his A.B. and A.M. degrees from Tufts University in 1969 and 1971, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977. He also studied for three years at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty, Hansen was an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975) and was a teaching fellow at Harvard University (1971–1976). A primary research interest of his has been German exile literature from the period 1933–1945, an area in which he wrote his dissertation and has published several articles. He is also interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of music and literature in German culture, with special attention to the collaboration between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He regularly teaches courses on this subject as well as on Richard Wagner and the art and culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

For several years his research focused on the post-war German writer Arno Schmidt, on whom he published several articles. Schmidt was a fascinating stylist and eccentric thinker in whose work Edgar Allan Poe plays a central role. Hansen devoted his research to explicating this aspect of German-American literary relations. An outgrowth of this research was the book on Poe's own relationship to German literature (with Burton R. Pollin), The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe: a Study of Literary References in His Works (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1995).

Among Professor Hansen's translations from the German to English is The Trumpet of Reform: German Literature in 19th Century New England (by Sigrid Bauschinger).

Language pedagogy, which is central to his teaching mission, explains a project that has been part of his life at Wellesley—the introductory German textbook (with co-author David B. Dollenmayer), Neue Horizonte: A First Course in German Language and Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin; 6th edition, 2002). For this latest edition the authors wrote an interactive, multimedia CD-ROM to augment the learning tools available to the beginner German student.

Professor Hansen's current project involves book design. He has finished a monograph on Georg Salter (1897–1967) who emigrated to New York from Germany in 1934 to change the face of the American book. See Classic Book Jackets: The Design Legacy of George Salter (N. Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).

He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, DAAD, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to assist his research.

Thomas Hansen resides with his wife, Abigail, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. They have a son, Nicholas.

***

Profile last updated: 8/04