Paul Fleming arrives at Cornell’s German Department after a decade at New York University, where he was Chair of German, Director of College Honors, and twice the recipient of NYU’s Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence. He received a Fulbright Grant to Germany after his undergraduate studies in Comparative Literature at Brown University and a Javits Fellowships during his Ph.D. work in German at John Hopkins University. His first book, The Pleasures of Abandonment. Jean Paul and the Life of Humor came out in 2006. He spent a year in Berlin on a Humboldt Research Grant, which resulted in his second book Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2009). His research interests include theories of the comic, aesthetics and hermeneutics, everyday life, and critical theory. He has published extensively, with recent articles on Hebel and mis/understanding; Hans Blumenberg and Carl Linnaeus; Elias Canetti and vitalism; childhood in Goethe and Jean Paul; and Adorno and Kommerell on Goethe’s Faust. He regularly translates from German, including Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic (2002) and Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River (2010). His current research project, tentatively titled The Perfect Story, examines the philosophical use of the anecdote with respect to questions of exemplarity, evidence, and contingency.