Peter Makhlouf

Peter Makhlouf received his PhD in Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature, where he taught until 2025. His research spans topics ancient, medieval, and modern, and focuses primarily on the German, Arabic, and classical (Latin and Greek) traditions. Recent essays and talks have been devoted to the intersection of Palestinian literature and thought and the German-Jewish tradition. He also maintains an abiding interest in both ancient reception and critical theory as well as poetics and political economy. Peter’s first monograph—provisionally titled Declinations: Stefan George’s Secret Empire—centers on the reception of late Roman decadence among the poets, scholars and artists in the circle around Stefan George from the 1890s through to the 1950s. Declinations explores how tropes of Roman imperium and downfall emerged from a maelstrom of radical aesthetic experiments, transgressive sexual groupings, and the traumas of the Great War, while responding in complex ways to the shifting fates of German empire. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, he will also begin work on a second book project that explores how Germany’s outsized role in dictating the intellectual foundations, fiscal policy, and migration laws of the European Union have shaped the country’s multilingual cultural production from 1945 until today. In tandem, these books center on the fraught dialogic of culture, ethnic identity, and (supra)national political imaginaries—a pervasive theme of his writing.

Faculty Mentor: Tobias Boes, Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies