Faculty & Staff

David S. Luft

Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History
Modern Central European History
Department of History
305B Milam Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331
Phone: (541) 737-3421
Fax: (541) 737-1257
Email: david.luft@oregonstate.edu

David Luft is a modern intellectual and cultural historian who works primarily on modern Central European history, including Germany, Austria, and the Habsburg Monarchy. 

Background

• Luft received his BA in comparative literature and philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1966 and his PhD in European history from Harvard University in 1972. Since then he has taught European history and humanities at the University of California, San Diego. He has received a variety of teaching awards and fellowships, most recently a Fulbright Fellowship in Cultural Studies in Vienna in 2004-2005. Sixteen doctoral students have completed their dissertations with him in the past twenty years, primarily in German and Austrian history and intellectual history.
• His first book, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1942, appeared with California in 1980. He was co-translator and co-editor with Burton Pike of Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses of Robert Musil in 1990. Luft’s most recent book, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer, appeared with Chicago in 2003.
• Luft is currently working on two book projects: The Austrian Tradition in German Culture: An Intellectual History and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Essays and Address, 1906-1929.

Books

• Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003).
• Robert Musil, Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, co-translated and edited with Burton Pike (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1990). [Paperback edition, 1994.]
• Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880-1942 (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1980).  [Second edition, paperback, 1984.]

Articles

• “Austrian Intellectual History and Bohemia,” The Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007), pp. 108-21.
•  “Das Intellektuelle Leben Österreichs in seiner Beziehung zur deutschen Sprache und der modernen Kultur,” Working Paper, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota, Fall 2006.
• “Thinking about Sexuality and Gender in Vienna,” in Sexuality in Austria, volume XV of  Contemporary Austrian Studies, ed. Günter Bischof/Anton Pelinka, Dagmar Herzog, Guest Editor, Fall 2006, pp. 21-30.
• “Cultural Memory and Intellectual History: Locating Austrian Literature,” in Gender, History, and Memory, Vol. 31 of Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, ed. Maria-Regina Kecht, No 1 (Summer 2007), pp. 25-45.
• “Being and German History: Historiographical Notes on the Heidegger Controversy,” Central European History, Vol. 27, No. 4, 1994, pp. 479-501.
• “The Writer and Austrian Culture: Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer,” in The Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical Perspective, ed. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms, Edinburgh, 1994, pp. 136-43.
• “Eros and Apperception in Heimito von Doderer's Tangenten,” Philosophie, Psychoanalyse, Emigration, ed. Peter Muhr, et. al., Vienna, 1992, pp. 194-209.
• “Austria as a Region of German Culture: 1900-1938,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. XXIII, 1992, pp. 135-48.
• “Science and Irrationalism in Freud's Vienna,” Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1990, pp. 89-97.
• “Austrian Intellectuals in the First Republic: Psychology, Philosophy, Literature,”Austria Between Wars: Dream and Reality, Washington, D.C., 1988, pp. 17-35.
• “Austrian History as a Field of Study in the United States,” in Modern Austrian Literature, Volume 20, Number 3/4, 1987, pp. 1-15.
• “Austrian Intellectuals and the Palace of Justice Fire,” in The Austrian Socialist Experiment, ed. by Anson Rabinbach, Westview Press, Boulder, Colo., 1985, pp. 151-56.
• “Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905,” in Central European History, March 1983, pp. 53-75.