Barbara Vinken holds the chair for French and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany. Currently the Lurcy Professor at the University of Chicago, she has also lately held Visiting Fellowships at the École des Hautes Études and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. As a literary critique, a fashion specialist, and a feminist, she regularly contributes to the Neue Züricher Zeitung, DIE ZEIT, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, and Nordwest- and Deutschlandradio. Among her latest publications are Flaubert Postsecular (Stanford 2015), Angezogen (Klett-Cotta 2014) and Die Blumen der Mode (Klett-Cotta 2016). She is currently working with Michèle Lowrie in the Classics department here at Chicago on the permanence of the Latin tradition in French Literature since the Revolution. As a 2014-2015 Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, Vinken collaborated with Michele Lowrie on the Neubauer Collegium project “Thinking through Tropes: Figures of Thought and the Political Imaginary.”

For more information, please visit her faculty profile.