Editors

Paul Fleming is the L. Sanford and Jo Mills Reis Professor of Humanities at Cornell University, where he teaches German and Comparative Literature and edits the Signale Book Series at Cornell Press and co-edits New German Critique. 

Fleming has published monographs on Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2009) and The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (2006) and is the translator of Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic (2002), Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River (2010), and the co-translator of Blumenberg’s Saint Matthew Passion (2021). He also recently co-edited a special issue of diacritics on Walter Benjamin’s Fate and Character. 

He is completing a short book on Redemptive Criticism (on Benjamin and Adorno reading the George School of poets and scholars), and another on Thinking through Stories (which explores the story as a mode of theory in the 20th century from Freud through Blumenberg). In recent years, Fleming has published essays on Theodor Adorno and Angela Davis regarding the relation between theory and praxis; foretelling fate in Benjamin; prefaces that demolish the book to follow; jokes and pensiveness in Blumenberg and Freud; and the aesthetics of close reading in Auerbach in addition to many other topics. He has edited or co-edited volumes on Siegfried Kracauer, Stefan George, Ulrich Peltzer, Hans Blumenberg, and Critical Theory after Frankfurt.

I took over the position of managing editor of Diacritics in 2020, thus returning to Cornell where I also earned my PhD. In the past, I have worked as managing editor for a university press, as translator in digital scholarship services, and as an instructor of film and media studies. I now run Diacritics full time, from submission queries and copyediting to art selection and final press-ready files. I enjoy supporting authors at all stages of their academic careers in refining their intellectual arguments and their personal writing styles.