David Lee

David Lee regularly teaches the course on German film and the graduate course for German and French students on research methods and bibliography. His principal scholarly interest is the German Enlightenment, and he is at work on an annotated critical edition of the correspondence between two writers of the mid eighteenth century, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim and Karl Wilhelm Ramler.

Professor Lee received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford. His first teaching position was at Fisk University in Nashville, where he spent four years. He has been at the University of Tennessee since 1970. For eleven years he served as the Head of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages.

In the course of his career, Professor Lee has lived for a total of six years in Germany. Since the reunification in 1990, he has spent nearly every summer there, primarily in Berlin, Weimar, and Halberstadt — cities that were part of the former German Democratic Republic and which today house the research materials in which he is interested. He has twice taken student groups to Berlin as part of the department’s course on Berlin in the 20th century. To get a more general European perspective on events, he spent Fall Semester 2003 as the faculty director of the UT study program at the University of Swansea in Wales.

Phone: 865-974-7158

Email: dlee@utk.edu

Education