Dr. Anna Hunt

Biography

Anna Hunt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. in German Literature from Yale University and has previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University in the John E. Sawyer Seminar, focusing on 'Ethical Subjects: Moralities, Laws, Histories.' Her research and teaching center on modern German literature, the Holocaust, the Frankfurt School, and critical theory. Currently, she is working on a book project titled 'Sites of Grief,' which aims to develop a new account of ethics in multicultural democratic communities grounded in positive law and shared norms. The project is an extension of her dissertation, and it reinterprets Walter Benjamin’s early writings, engaging with the concept of 'forgiveness' that was notably absent from his famous 1921 essays. Hunt's work traces the afterlives of this problem through the lens of Bertolt Brecht’s late elegiac turn, offering insights into community models that rely on shared judgments in response to catastrophic loss.

Research Interests