Muller-Sievers named director of Center for Humanities and the Arts

Helmut Muller-Sievers, professor in the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been named the new director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

During his term as director, he also will hold the Eaton Professorship, an endowed faculty position in the College of Arts and Sciences.

"I'm honored and delighted," Muller-Sievers said. "When I decided to come to CU-Boulder last year, the strength and promise of its humanities faculty and the culture of interdisciplinary collaboration were among the main attractions. I hope faculty and students will bring their best ideas to the center, and continue to avail themselves of the many opportunities we offer."

Muller-Sievers joined the Boulder faculty in the fall of 2009, after a distinguished two-decade career at Northwestern University. There, he was a professor of German literature and classics and also served at different times as director of the program in comparative literary studies and director of the Alice Kaplan Center for the Humanities. His Ph.D., in German, is from Stanford University; he also earned a master's degree from Freie Universitat Berlin. He completed his undergraduate work at the Universitat Dusseldorf in German and Latin literature and philosophy.

He is the author of 30 articles and four books, including the recently completed "The Cylinder: Kinematics of the 19th Century." His scholarly interests include science, technology and literature in the 18th and 19th centuries; philosophy and literature; philology and hermeneutics; and classical cultures.

Muller-Sievers has spoken on a wide variety of topics around the world and has won grants and fellowships from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, the Mellon Foundation and the Max-Planck-Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin.

He was selected director of the center after an internal search conducted by a faculty committee chaired by Thomas Zeiler, professor of history. He will assume the directorship on July 1, succeeding Michael Zimmerman, professor of philosophy, who served from 2006-2010.