Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He studied at Konstanz University, the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Until 2009 he held the H. Gordon Garbedian Chair at Columbia University, where he also served as co-chair of the Theater Ph.D. program. He now holds the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.

His early work as a literary critic focused on modernism, especially such genres as the closet drama, the literary manifesto, and modern drama. His philosophical work concerns the philosophical dialogue and the intersections of theater and philosophy.

In an interview with Rain Taxi, Puchner anticipates the avant-garde in the 21st century in its relation to media, asserting “We are going through a media revolution even more extreme than that of the 20th century. I would say that an avant-garde for the 21st century would have to develop ways of using our own new media in critical, innovative, provocative ways. It would also have to be part of a political analysis of our moment, and translate that analysis into a new set of attitudes and ambitions.”

His more recent work focused on large-scale projects in literature, technology, and cultural history. He is the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and lectures on world literature.

In 2016 he launched a HarvardX MOOC on World Literature.

In 2017, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently is a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.

In 2017, he published a sweeping account of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet: The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization. New York: Random House, 2017. The book won advance praise from Margaret Atwood. The book was widely reviewed and translated into twenty languages.

On October 13, 2020, W. W. Norton & Company published his book, The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate. The book was reviewed in the New York Times and other venues,. The book interweaves family history with an account of the underground language of central Europe called Rotwelsch. It was long-listed for the Wingate Prize. Michael Rosen, in The Guardian, called it "A book about history, language and culture wrapped up in a detective story. . . It feels as if the writer is peeling back the skin to reveal Germany. I found it fascinating."

In 2022 he published Literature for a Changing Language, based on the inaugural Lectures in European History at Oxford University. The book has been called "a stirring manifesto." It calls for a new approach to storytelling in an era of climate change, and has been widely reviewed in the Financial Times and other venues.

In 2023, he published Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-pop., which takes us on a breakneck tour through pivotal moments in world history, providing a global introduction to the arts and humanities in one engaging volume. It has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Boston Globe the Wall Street Journal, Elle and Time Magazine and other newspapers.