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Michael Jennings focuses his teaching and research on European culture in the twentieth century. In addition to literature, he teaches on topics in cultural theory and the visual arts, with special emphasis on photography. He approaches cultural material from a perspective informed by historicist interpretive strategies and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Jennings is an Associated Faculty Member of the Department of Art and Archaeology, the Department of French and Italian, and the School of Architecture; he is a Faculty Associate of the Center for the Study of Religion. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Ph.D. Program in Humanistic Studies. He is the author of two books on Walter Benjamin: Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1987) and, with Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard University Press, 2014). He also serves as the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin’s works, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Harvard University Press, four volumes, 1996ff.) and the editor of a series of collections of Benjamin’s texts intended for classroom use, including The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2007); with Brigid Doherty and Thomas Levin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media (2008) ; and One Way Street (forthcoming in 2016). His new translation of Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Trauerspiel (with Howard Eiland) will appear in 2016. His published work includes articles on the theory of art history (Alois Riegl, Wihelm Worringer), modernism in its relationship to capitalist modernity (Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Uwe Johnson), Weimar culture (Berlin Dada, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, forms of literary criticism), eighteenth-century aesthetics (Sturm und Drang, J.M.R. Lenz, Friedrich Hölderlin), modern media (print culture and modernism), and German photography (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Michael Schmidt). He is the editor, with Detlef Mertins, of a facsimile edition of the avantgarde journal G: Journal of Elemental Form-Creation, (Getty Research Institute, 2010); with Tobias Wilke, of a special issue of Grey Room on Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Media; and with Stanley Corngold, of a special issue of Monatshefte on Kafka's Late Style. He is currently at work on two book projects: a critical biography of Bertolt Brecht and a study of the German photo-essay in the twentieth century . Jennings serves as Director of the Alexander Kluge Research Collection at Princeton University and the Co-Director, with Ben Morgan and Anthony Phelan, of the Oxford-Princeton Research Collaboration in German. He serves as co-chair of the Executive Committee of the International Walter Benjamin Society and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Uwe Johnson Association. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Vermischte Nachrichten: Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch; Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking World; links: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca; and Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy and Culture. After serving as Master of Rockefeller College from 1990-1999 and as Chair of the Department of German from 1999-2012, Jennings served as co-chair of the steering committee for Princeton University's decennial accreditation process (2011-2014).