Liliane Weissberg

After teaching as an assistant professor of German at Johns Hopkins University (1983-1989), Weissberg joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor of German and Comparative Literature in 1989 and was promoted to full professor in 1994. She was the Joseph B. Glossberg Term Chair in the Humanities for several years. Since 2004, she has been the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences. At Penn, she has several times served as graduate chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and as Director of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.

Weissberg graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 1977 with a master's degree in general and comparative literature, German studies, and linguistics. She obtained a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 1984, concentrating on American, German, and French literature. Her dissertation thesis examined allegories in Edgar Allan Poe.

Liliane Weissberg (born 1953) is an American literary scholar and cultural historian specializing in German-Jewish studies and German and American literature. She is currently the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She received, among others, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Research Award for her research on German-Jewish literature and culture and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, and holds an honorary degree from the University of Graz.

Liliane Weissberg was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1953 to a Jewish family. Her parents were political refugees who had fled from Poland in 1949. She grew up in Frankfurt, Germany.