Writer to hold Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship at the Peter Szondi Institute during the 2024/2025 winter semester
The American author Mark Haber will hold the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin, during the 2024/2025 winter semester. His inaugural lecture, "The Language of the Library," will take place at 6:00 p.m. on November 14, 2024. This event will be open to the public.Mark Haber was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Florida, and now lives in Minneapolis. His first collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions, was published in 2008. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden, which was released by the prestigious publishing house Coffee House Press in 2019, was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award. Haber’s second novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, was called a "sparkling comic novel" by the New York Times and hailed as one of the best books of 2022 by the New York Public Library, Literary Hub, and Southwest Review. His third novel, Lesser Ruins, will be published in October 2024. His fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southwest Review, and Air/Light.
Haber’s literary works grapple with themes related to history and memory. Imbued with black humor, they depict melancholy in the face of the upheavals wrought by modernity, explore the vagaries of human relationships, and portray efforts to search for meaning through art, all the while displaying a close intermedial connection to subjects like Renaissance painting.
Haber will be teaching a seminar titled "The Imagination of Place" in his role as Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor at Freie Universität Berlin. The seminar, which will be held in English, will address the ways in which geography and place impact our sense of imagination. In a trajectory through literary history and theory, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Haber and his students will explore how fictional places are construed in our imaginations, how they relate to our knowledge of nonfictional places, and how they depend on specific word choices. Students will develop their own imagined places in creative writing exercises and juxtapose them with places from the history of literature. The course is aimed at both writers and those who have a general interest in fiction.
The Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship for Literature has been awarded by the Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin since 1998. It is funded by Freie Universität Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), publishing house S. Fischer Verlag, and Holtzbrinck Berlin - Inspire Together. Writers from different literatures and cultures are invited to teach at the institute for one semester to help facilitate critical reflection upon world literatures.
The Latin words veritas, justitia, and libertas, which frame the seal of Freie Universität Berlin, stand for the values that have defined the academic ethos of Freie Universität since its founding in December 1948.
