My research interests, although broad by some standards, focus on the most basic of questions: what does it mean to read.  To that end, I am interested in how texts construct identity and how literature summons a kind of thinking that would otherwise be unavailable to thought.  So much for my theoretical interests.  My current project investigates the textual constructions of Jewish and queer identities at the turn of the nineteenth century and the manner in which class mobilizes such constructions without ever being identified as such.  My first book, The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic and the Attraction of Goethe, examined Italy as a phantasmic space (phantasmic because it was modeled on the phantasm of ancient Greece) that gave rise to a canonical tradition.  My teaching interests tend to examine the intersections between literature and philosophy but always with an interest as to how that intersection has a distinctly historical character.  I frequently teach courses on Jewish-German relations, the Holocaust and ones that place philosophical, literary and cultural texts (including film) in dialogue with each other.