Liliane Weissberg is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her more recent book publications are: Affinität wider Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule (2011); Über Haschisch und Kabbalah. Gershom Scholem, Siegfried Unseld und das Werk von Walter Benjamin (2012); (with Karen Beckman), On Writing With Photography (2013) Juden. Geld. Eine Vorstellung. Frankfurt/M: Campus Verlag (2013); Münzen, Hände, Noten, Finger: Berliner Hofjuden und die Erfindung einer deutschen Musikkultur (2018); (with Andreas Kilcher), Nachträglich, grundlegend? Der Kommentar als Denkform in der jüdischen Moderne von Hermann Cohen bis Jacques Derrida (2018). Weissberg has taught as a visiting professor at universities in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Within the field of Holocaust Studies, Weissberg has been particularly interested in the relationship of memory and material culture, and the problem of witnessing.  

As she began preparing a new course — “Witnessing, Remembering, and Writing the Holocaust” — Professor Weissberg wanted to show Holocaust survivors as they told their stories. Words printed on a page could never capture the subtle gestures, inflections and pauses available in watching survivors tell their stories. Integrating testimony into her course let her and her students try to answer: How do we witness? What do we remember and choose not to remember? What do we then articulate? Professor Weissberg wants her students to think about the lifelong impact of genocide. “You may survive the war,” she said, “but how will you survive your memories?”  

A few of her book publications include: a critical edition of Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan Ben-Amos, 1999) and Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001).