Ulrich Baer

Ulrich Baer is a writer, translator, and scholar who believes passionately in the transformative power of ideas and books, and that real conversations play a key role in our evolution as conscious, responsible and compassionate people — hence, his publications, including single-authored and edited books, his commitment to higher education, and his podcasts.

Baer’s published oeuvre includes books on a range of topics, including poetry, photography, free speech, September 11, Holocaust testimonies, as well as a dystopian novel (We Are But a Moment, 2017), and a collection of stories (Beggar’s Chicken: Stories from Shanghai, 2012). He has translated and edited some of poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings in German and in English translation (now also available in Korean, Greek, and Portuguese), most recently Rilke on Love (2020) and The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation (2018). His analysis of free speech in the 21st century university, What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus (Oxford University Press, 2019), deepens his widely debated defense of the university’s obligation to use free speech as a tool to create knowledge by the greatest number of participants first made in 2017 in The New York Times. He is Editorial Director at Warbler Press where he has written or commissioned 21st-century introductions to classic books (including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, with Carol Gilligan, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, On Love, Lady Windermere’s Fan, and An Ideal Husband, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, E.A. Poe’s Selected Writings, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, with Glenn Wallis, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild). His podcasts have featured about 136 distinguished guests on books by Chinua Achebe, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Toomer, Franz Kafka, and many other authors, in addition to free speech, the monuments debate, affirmative action, cancel culture, book bans, and what makes a good teacher truly good.

He is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and serves as Director of NYU’s Center for the Humanities. A recipient of Getty, Humboldt, and Guggenheim fellowships, he has twice been honored with NYU’s student-nominated Golden Dozen Teaching Award. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, as a freshman, earned his BA from Harvard College (where his concentration was Varsity Crew), and received his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. He serves on the board of the New York Institute for the Humanities, where he has also been a fellow since 2002.

Ulrich is the father of two children, an avid urban gardener, and an eternal beginner in Shaolin kung fu. He was born in Germany and moved to the U.S. as a teenager; today he lives in Manhattan, New York City.