April 2021

Dr. Oliver Berghof

• What's your favorite book to read for fun?

  Leo Damrosch – The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age.

  
  Peter Sloterdijk – The Aesthetic Imperative

• What's your favorite book to teach?

  Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy

• Do you have a favorite film?
  Children of Paradise (dir. Marcel Carné, 1945)
• How do you spend your free time?

  All kinds of sports – anything that makes me move around, particularly if it has to do with water, or with making a sphere travel through space.

• What is your biggest literary inspiration?

  There isn’t just one that towers above the rest.  Depending on the circumstances I would look up to Lucian, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, William Wordsworth, Heinrich Heine – and many others.

• What's your cure for writer's block?

  Observe your own internal thought processes while you are thinking about your topic and write down what goes through your head as you are considering what to write – before you know it, you will have started.
  
  

• What are you working on outside of class?

  Finishing a translation of Peter Sloterdijk’s Die schrecklichen Kinder der Moderne (The terrible children of modernity), which should appear later this year with Columbia University Press.