Dr. Anne Pollok studied Philosophy, German Literature, and Law at Marburg University (M.A. 2004). She received her Dr. phil. from Halle University (summa cum laude, 2007).
2007/08 she joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina as an Instructor. 2008/9 the Leo Baeck Postdoctoral Fellowship allowed her a year of research at Stanford University. She stayed in the Bay Area until 2013, working at Stanford as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Introduction to the Humanities / Thinking Matters Program.
Anne Pollok’s dissertation on Moses Mendelssohn’s Anthropology is praised to become a “new classic” in the Mendelssohn literature. In 2012 it earned her the Moses Mendelssohn Prize, awarded by the Dessau Foundation for the Promotion of the Humanities. She is also an acclaimed editor of Mendelssohn’s works, published by Meiner, Hamburg.
Her current project centers on the emergence of rational anthropology in the 18th century as a richer and more humanistic alternative to naturalistic tendencies in philosophical inquiries into our rational and social human nature.For her research, Anne Pollok was awarded the Kristeller-Popkin Travel Fellowship by the Journal of the History of Philosophy in 2012; she won Residential Fellowships at the Marbach Institute of Literature (2011), and the Herzog August Library at Wolfenbuettel (2012/13).
Most recent publications:
“The Power of Rituals. Mendelssohn and Cassirer on the Religious Dimension of Bildung”, in: Religious Studies (forthcoming 2014).
“Kant’s defeated counterpart. Moses Mendelssohn on the beauty, mechanics, and death of the human soul”, in: Kant’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, ed. by Riccardo Pozzo and Marco Sgarbi. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 103-130.
“Schmiedet keine Hypothesen! Mendelssohn und Lessing diskutieren den Fortschritt”, in: Moses Mendelssohn. Special Edition of Text + Kritik. Ed. by Heinz-Ludwig Arnold. München: Edition Text + Kritik, 2011, pp. 64-75.
“Cassirer’s Kant: From the Animal Morale to the Animal Symbolicum”, with Konstantin Pollok, in: Yearbook for German Idealism 8 (2011), pp. 282-315.
Facetten des Menschen. Zu Moses Mendelssohns Anthropologie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2010 (= Studien zum 18. Jahrhundert 32), pp. 630. (Review by Cord-Friedrich Berghahn, in: Arbitrium 29.2 (2011), pp. 184-86.)
