Areas of research: Figurality, 18-20th Century German and French Theory, Long 18th Century German Literature, Classical Reception Languages: German, Latin, French Silke Weineck received an M.A. in German Literature from the Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1998. She is the author of The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness (2004). Additional publications include articles on Plato, Ben Jonson, Hoelderlin, Kleist, Buechner, Nietzsche, Freud, Carl Schmitt, and Paul Celan, as well as translations of two poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. She is the recipient of a FIPSE-Grant (2000), an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellowship (2004), and a Michigan Humanities Award (2010). She serves on the steering committee of Michigan’s faculty consortium Contexts for Classics, the editorial board of the journal Cultural Critique and the editorial board of book series New Directions in German Studies (Continuum), and she coordinates the kinship and family network of the German Studies Association. She is currently completing a book on the long history of paternal tropes, tentatively titled The Laius Complex: Politics and Tragic Paternity. Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on “The University” and graduate seminars on the “Theory of Metaphor,” “Sovereignty,” “20th Century German and European Theory,” and the “Theory of Tragedy.”