User:Anthony Krupp
Employment
I am currently an Assistant Professor of German and Director of Undergraduate Studies (or factotum) for German at the University of Miami. Here is my faculty homepage.
Work on the web
Most of my work on wikipedia has to do with German literature, the eighteenth century, and childhood. In 2006, I worked a great deal on the reorganization of German-language literature and German-language philosophy, learning much about consensus-building on the 'net in the process.
In addition to my pro bono work here, I have written a few reviews for Amazon.com.
Book
I have authored a book manuscript provisionally called Reason's Children. Childhood in Early Modern Philosophy. It has chapters on Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, as well as a translation into English of a text by Pierre Bayle. It is currently under provisional contract with an American university press; when this becomes a final contract, I will mention which press it is! My study has already received the following blurbs:
- "One must be grateful for a book like Reason’s Children that combines erudition and elegance, wit and humane feeling, ingenuity and insight. It is the child not of fashion, but of painstaking scholarship and sound judgment. Anthony Krupp confidently guides his reader through uncharted terrain, pointing out discovery after discovery along the way. Where we formerly imagined there to be only desert, a garden now teems with ideas. Krupp’s concise and yet abundant study will be considered indispensable to eighteenth-century studies for years to come."
- -David E. Wellbery, LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor, University of Chicago
- "The place of childhood in the thinking of major philosophers has not been much appreciated, or even well understood.. Anthony Krupp’s Childhood in Early Modern Philosophy makes a major contribution toward remedying the situation. His carefully researched study expands our understanding of what John Locke has to say about children. Moreover, in surveying the role of children in the thinking of Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, Krupp explores largely virgin territory. This work is an important contribution to the history of modern philosophy and to the relatively new field of childhood studies."
- -Gareth B. Matthews, author of The Philosophy of Childhood
I am also editing a collection of papers on the works of Karl Philipp Moritz. It will be published by Rodopi as one of the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik.
Article publications
I will gladly email anyone a PDF of any of the following articles.
- “Cultivation as Maturation: Infants, Children, and Adults in Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica,” Monatshefte 98.4 (2006): 524-38.
- “Observing Children in an Early Journal of Psychology: Karl Philipp Moritz’s Gnothi sauton (Know Thyself),” Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity, ed. Anja Müller (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 33-42.
- “Das Gehen als Grundfigur bei Karl Philipp Moritz,” Karl Philipp Moritz in Berlin 1786-1793, ed. Christof Wingertszahn and Ute Tintemann (Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2005), 215-32.
- “Großer Dankchoral, Op. 5” and “Notes on the Krupp/Brecht Großer Dankchoral,” Brecht Yearbook 30 (2005): 353-61.
- “1865, Summer: Unruly Children. Wilhelm Busch publishes Max und Moritz, a forerunner of the comics that would become one of Germany’s most popular books.” A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 608-14.
- “Other Relations: the Pre-History of le moi and (das) Ich in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Philipp Moritz, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte,” Goethe Yearbook 11 (2002): 111-31.
Zukunftsmusik (current articles I watch; possible future publications)
1) I've begun to read Baruch Spinoza's works, in Samuel Shirley's translations. Comparing them to the Latin and Dutch original texts, I have noticed some errors that I will indicate in an amazon review soon. Why am I reading Spinoza? First because I didn't treat him in my book, which jumped from Descartes to Leibniz. That's been bugging me. (So I will be on the lookout for his statements on infants and children, in case it seems feasible to write an article on this topic.) Second, from Jonathan Israel's books, I have a deeper appreciation for the importance of Spinoza's philosophy for the radical and mainstream currents of Enlightenment. In particular, now that I'm more interested in Lessing, it's just clear to me that one should ideally understand something about Spinoza in order to better know Lessing. Third, and more personally than professionally, I suspect that Philip Pullman's fictional universe owes something to Spinoza, so it feels timely to be reading Spinoza during the holiday season, as I prepare to go see The Golden Compass (film).
2) I have resumed research on the role of Persia in G. E. Lessing's thought. Here on wikipedia, I've been involved in pages related to Zoroastrianism, and successfully mediated an edit war at Parsi. I have found this helpful to my academic work. I would like to write an essay on Lessing's Persians, to help undistract readers of Nathan the Wise from undue focus on the famous ring parable. Remember that Al-Hafi is walking to India just at the moment when Nathan is telling this fairy tale to Saladin. Lessing's essay, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, is also relevant to my project in that Lessing there distinguishes between the 'children of education' (the abrahamic religions) and the 'children of nature' (the Persians, i.e., Zoroastrians).
3) I have recently taken an interest in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, a trilogy that reminded me of my best childhood reading experiences. Reading this has finally moved me to start reading Milton's Paradise Lost. I am thinking about writing a short piece on the trilogy's (possibly Spinozist) theology, and on the work's ending (the necessity of Will and Lyra to separate), which I believe simulates the experience of completing a book one has read extensively. That is, the ending is an analogue of the necessity of the 'child reader' to leave the fictional universe and reenter the real world. Pullman's ending has a function not unlike Goethe's preface to the second edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Teaching
I have received three teaching awards:
- the 2002 University of Miami Greek Community's Outstanding Faculty Award
- the 2005-06 American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Innovative Course Design Award
- the 2006 University of Miami Excellence in Teaching Award. (For a video recording of my presentation, click here).
Music
Although my work is primarily identifiable as belonging to German Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Intellectual History, I also have some interest and competence, both practical and theoretical, in common practice (tonal) music. I aim to eventually research and publish articles in word-music studies, in particular on these themes:
- concepts of heroism in Goethe's play Egmont, the incidental music Beethoven composed for it, and analyses of both by Scott Burnham in Beethoven Hero
- what the miller hears in Franz Schubert's song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin
- sobriety and its others in a Faust cantata by Alfred Schnittke
To this and other ends, I have been engaging in self-study of harmony and voice-leading, using a textbook by Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter, and have begun to study counterpoint under the direction of Paul Wilson. If I can figure out how to do so, and assuming this is compatible with wikipedia policy, I may post mp3 files here, should anyone be curious to hear the passacaglias and fugues I have begun to compose. I trust that this will make me a more informed teacher of Thomas Mann's novel, Dr. Faustus, as well as a better reader of Heinrich Schenker.
For quick reference in dealing with vandals
Warning templates
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For copying and pasting onto Pullman vandals
- One thought for you to consider: don't confuse a hatred of the Inquisition with a hatred of Jesus Christ. If you've read Pullman's book, you know that Lyra descends into the underworld to free souls that have been in captivity of demonic creatures. This theme of redemption is a Christian one. I am not suggesting that Pullman is a theist, but I think that a real Christian can read the books and find themes supported and affirmed in them that are also central to Christianity. But it's true, in my opinion, that Pullman hates what the Church has done in the name but not in the spirit of Jesus Christ. Decide which one you support: the Christian Inquisition or the Christian ideals of love and charity, which Pullman's novels thoroughly affirm. Best,