Anna Hunt

Anna Hunt is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where she is also affiliated with the European Union Center and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. She holds a Ph.D. in German Literature from Yale University and previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the John E. Sawyer Seminar on “Ethical Subjects: Moralities, Laws, Histories” at Rutgers University.

Her research and teaching focus on modern German literature, the Holocaust, the Frankfurt School, and critical theory. Her book project Sites of Grief develops a new account of ethics in multicultural democratic communities that is grounded not in positive law or shared norms, but in practices of mourning that recognise vulnerability, woundedness, and disability as the basis for collective life. The project grows from her dissertation, which reinterpreted Walter Benjamin’s early writings as an extended effort to reckon with the word “forgiveness,” a word that he systematically erased from his famous 1921 essays but around which they all orbit. Tracing the afterlives of this problem, the book reads Bertolt Brecht’s late turn to elegy as a sustained engagement with Benjamin’s work, illuminating a model of community rooted not in consensus or judgment but in shared responses to catastrophic loss.