Besides teaching in Core, Peter Schwartz teaches courses in German and comparative literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures; film courses in the program in Cinema and Media Studies; and a freshman seminar on propaganda in Kilachand Honors College. His special interests include European neoclassicism, romanticism and modernism, early film and photography, the critical work of the Frankfurt School, literary and musical folk genres, propaganda, and the “science of culture” (Kulturwissenschaft) of the art historian Aby Warburg and his circle.
He is the author of After Jena: Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the End of the Old Regime (Bucknell UP, 2010) and of articles on Goethe and his age, the Faust tradition in its relation to media history, Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, the films of Michael Haneke, and the war archive of the German cultural historian Aby Warburg. Recent publications include the English translation from the German of André Jolles’s classic work of genre theory Simple Forms (2017), an iconographic study of Chinese Communist paper money and Soviet silent film (2014), an essay on Warburg and cinema (2020), and a co-edited volume of essays on Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s collective documentary video project Labour in a Single Shot (2022).