Niklaus Largier

Niklaus Largier teaches comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In his most recent research, he focuses on the history of the religious imagination and on the forms in which it has shaped literary and philosophical traditions. With a particular interest in ascetic and mystical practices and styles of writing, his books contribute to the understanding of the history of emotions and of sense experience from the Middle Ages to Modernist experimental works.

After studying German Literature, Philosophy, and Russian in Zurich and Paris, Niklaus Largier received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1989. He is the recipient of a Swiss National Research Foundation Grant (1993/96), of a Fellowship in residence at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (1992/93), of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), and of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 2000 and has a joint appointment in the Departments of German and of Comparative Literature.

Largier was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University (2006), at the University of Konstanz (2013), and at Princeton University (2016); a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2010-11), and at the Kolleg-Forschergruppe BildEvidenz (2014).