Günter Leypoldt (BA. Cape Town, 1994; PhD Tübingen, 2000) is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Previously he taught American Studies at the universities of Tübingen (2001-7), Maryland, College Park (2003), and Mainz (2007-2009). He is the author of Casual Silences: The Poetics of Minimal Realism (Trier, 2001) and Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (Edinburgh UP, 2009), and editor (with Bernd Engler) of American Cultural Icons: The Production of Representative Lives (Würzburg, 2010). His recent research interests include cultural and literary theory; cultural sociology and aesthetics; transatlantic romanticism and modernism, American pragmatism, the sociology of knowledge formation, nineteenth-century literary culture and philosophy, and contemporary fiction. He is presently working on a study of cultural charisma. (CCS Visiting Fellow, August 2013 – February 2014)
