Dr. Peter Höyng

Biography

Dr. Peter Höyng [pronounced Hö-ing] studied Germanistik and European history in Bonn and Siegen and received his Ph.D. in German literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After years of teaching, research, and service at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, he joined the faculty of the German Studies Department at Emory’s College of Arts & Sciences in 2005.

As a scholar of German-language cultural productions, Höyng investigates and situates artistic activity within its historical context, critically examining its continued significance in the early twenty-first century. This scholarly focus has led to his specialization in five interrelated fields:

(a) dramatic texts within their performative contexts; 

(b) the works of assimilated German-Jewish artists, activists, and intellectuals; 

(c) German-speaking narratives on anti-Black racism in Europe and the US in the early twentieth century;

(d) interactions between literature and classical music;

(e) German-Austrian culture in Vienna as a political-geographic center merging the above strands.

Due to his research interest in German-Jewish cultural history, Höyng is an affiliated faculty with the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies.

Höyng has an extensive bibliography, which includes five books and fifty essays in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Höyng also has been awarded numerous institutional research grants and secured several grants for his scholarship and teaching from organizations such as the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Max Kade Foundation, the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation, and the Claus Halle Foundation.

In 2002, he received the Jefferson Prize from the University of Tennessee for his excellence in research. In the spring semester of 2013, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaften (Institute for Cultural Studies) in Vienna, Austria. In 2021, he was recognized twice for teaching as Professor of the Year by the AATG-Georgia Chapter and the Emory College Language Center for Excellence in Teaching.