Professor Jane O. Newman has been appointed to an Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship. Dickson served as a Regent of the University from 1913 to 1946, the longest tenure of any Regent; his endowment was established to award annual professorships to Emeritus faculty, in acknowledgment of high academic standing and long-term service to the University. The endowment provides the Dickson Professor with a research stipend of $20,000.00.
During her tenure as a Dickson Professor, Newman will be completing Early / Modern Mimesis: Essays on Erich Auerbach. The book seeks to complicate received narratives about Auerbach by focusing on his early work when he was embedded in the theo-philosophical discursive contexts he encountered as a faculty member at the University of Marburg (1929 to 1935-36). In these contexts, the disciplines of philology, theology, philosophy, and the history of religion were not as distant from one another as it has become conventional to think they are or must be. Each chapter sets Auerbach’s work on the pre- and early modern periods in dialogue with the work of twentieth-century theologians, philosophers, and historians of religion such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Max Horkheimer. Professor Newman is the translator of a collection of Auerbach’s previously untranslated essays (Princeton UP, 2014; ppb. 2016).
It was Newman’s research on Auerbach, a German-Jewish academic forced into a prolonged exilic life, first in Istanbul, Turkey, and then in the United States after the end of World War Two, that led her to her work with contemporary scholars around the world whose research has been negatively impacted by government threats. She founded the UCI chapter of Scholars At Risk in 2016-17 and serves on the Steering Committee of the U.S. Section of the Scholars at Risk global network (https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/).