Political Science Faculty and Staff
Wolfgang Natter
Professor
Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 1990
Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 1990
Wolfgang Natter recently joined the Department and University, where he also serves as Director of Virginia Tech’s Alliance of Social, Political, Ethical, Cultural Thought (ASPECT). Prior to his arrival, he was a professor at the University of Kentucky, where he was co-founder and long term director of that University’s Committee on Social Theory. In recent years, he has also been a visiting professor at the University of Jena, was Leibniz Professor at the Center for Advanced Study, Leipzig University, was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and at the Center for Social and Political Thought at the University of South Florida. Professor Natter earned his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and his Masters and Ph.D from The Johns Hopkins University.
Wolfgang’s teaching encompasses various aspects of political, social, and cultural theory. Recurring seminar topics have included Globalization, Democracy, Sustainability; Poststructural Social Science; Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School; Space, Identity, Representation; and Alternative Political Thought. He is author of Literature at War, Representing ‘the Time of Greatness’ in Germany (Yale), and co-editor of Postmodern Contentions; Objectivity and its Other; and The Social and Political Body (all with Guilford). He has edited several special journal issues, most recently on the theme of Political Ecology, Territoriality and Scale (Geojournal). Recent articles have focused on film and critical whiteness studies; on identity and globalization ‘from below’; on civil society and democracy; on the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ cultural geography; on German Geopolitics of the 1920s and 1930s; and on political geographies of contingent universality. Among other ongoing projects, Wolfgang is working on a book titled Friedrich Ratzel’s Spatial Turn.
Dr. Natter’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition to his on-campus administrative duties, he serves as Executive Director of the International Social Theory Consortium and as co-director (with Herb Reid and Betsy Taylor) of the emerging Center for Democratic Planning and Participatory Research, which is an outgrowth of their Rockefeller supported work on Civic Professionalism, Global Regionalism and the Scaling Up of Social Justice. Other service activities include past duties on the editorial boards of disClosure, the Publications of the Modern Language Association, The Annals of American Geography, German Studies Review, and present duties on the editorial boards of Social Geography and Ethics, Place, Environment.
Email: Wolfgang Natter