Werner Hamacher, born 1948, studied comparative literature, philosophy, German literature, sociology and religious studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. From 1984 to 1998 he was professor of German and the humanities at Johns Hopkins University, USA, from 1998 professor of general and comparative literature in Frankfurt am Main, and since 2005 he had also taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. He has held numerous guest professorships, including in New York, Amsterdam, Yale, Paris and Berlin. His work lies along the boundaries of literary scholarship and the philosophy of language and history, in the field of aesthetics and hermeneutics.
