Erica Weitzman received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University in the spring of 2012. Her forthcoming book, Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth and the German Comic Tradition (Northwestern University Press), explores the ways in which Romantic irony is reactivated in the early twentieth century to create a new form of the comic with broad implications. Her current project focuses on the notion of the obscene as a problem of representation in German realism, particularly in terms of the crossing of the “reality effect” and the waning of anthropological framing devices. Weitzman has spent the past year at the Universität Konstanz as a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the Graduiertenkolleg “Das Reale in der Kultur der Moderne.” As a Mellon Fellow in the departments of German and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, she will be teaching courses on German and European literature, aesthetics, and intellectual history.