John B. Lyon
Associate Professor

PhD, Princeton University, 1997

Director of Graduate Studies, Departmental Webmaster

1409 Cathedral of Learning
412-624-5839
jblyon@pitt.edu

Areas of Research and Teaching Focus

• Late 18th- and 19th-century literature and culture
• Intellectual history
• Violence and the human body in German culture
• Place and Space in 19th-century literature and culture

Courses Taught Recently

• Indo-European Folktales (undergraduate)
• Introduction to Literary Analysis (undergraduate)
• Structures of the German Language (undergraduate)
• Literature and Culture 1830–1890 (undergraduate)
Topics in German Prose (undergraduate)
Romanticism (undergraduate and graduate)
Intellectual History (Aesthetics—graduate)
• 19th-century German Literature (graduate)
• 19th-century German Realism (graduate)

Recent and Significant Publications and Projects

• Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self: Violence and Identity in Early 19th Century German Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2006).
• “‘The Science of Sciences:’ Replication and Reproduction in Lavater’s Physiognomics." Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (Winter, 2007): 257-277.
• “Büchner and Theory: Never the Twain Shall Meet?” Georg Büchner: Neue Perspektiven zur internationalen Rezeption.  Ed. Dieter Sevin.  Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2007.  219-230..
• “‘You Can Kill, but You Cannot Bring to Life...’: Aesthetic Education and the Instrumentalization of Pain in Schiller and Hölderlin.” (Literature and Medicine 24.1, Special Issue on Narrative, Pain, and Suffering, 2005)
• “Mediation and Domination: Paternity, Violence, and Art in Brentano’s Godwi,” in Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship. Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold. Ed. Gerhard Richter. UNC Press. 2002
• “Was nemlich mehr sei, das Ganze oder das Einzelne’: Hölderlin’s Hyperion as an Unresolved Crisis,” German Life and Letters, vol. 51, no. 1 (January 1998), 1-14.
• “The Inevitability of Rhetorical Violence: Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death,” Modern Language Studies, vol. 26, nos. 2 and 3 (Spring and Summer 1996), pages 99-110.

Other

• Member of MLA ad hoc Committee on the Professionalization of Graduate Students, Modern Language Association (2000–2002)
• Secretary-Treasurer, Goethe Society of North America