Peter Makhlouf

Peter Makhlouf received his Ph.D. in Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature, where he taught until 2025. He is a scholar of multilingual, transnational histories of poetry and poetics, whose published work spans topics ancient, medieval, and modern. He has also written for public fora online and in print, including Jewish Currents, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Marginalia. Recent essays and lectures have been devoted to the chronopoetics and -politics of catastrophe at the intersection of Palestinian literature and thought and the German-Jewish tradition. 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. Affective investments in Rome's postclassical inheritance served to manage anxieties around Germany's status as imperial late-comer, while the country's proverbially belated national trajectory came to be refigured in terms of the literary politics of belatedness. All of his work is animated by a longstanding commitment to the study of culture as both a site for the elaboration of imperial rule and a heterodox archive of anticolonial resistance—a commitment he owes to traditions of liberation theology first cultivated during his Jesuit education.

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