Robert Holub, Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of German in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures (GLL), was appointed interim chair of the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures (NESA), effective July 1. He was also reappointed chair of GLL, a post he has held since 2014.

Holub, who earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came to Ohio State in 2012. Prior to his arrival, Holub served as chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst campus from 2008 to 2012 and was provost at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 2006 to 2008. He taught in the German department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1979 to 2006, where he also chaired of the department from 1991 to 1997 and was dean of the undergraduate division in the College of Letters and Science from 2003 to 2006.

Holub’s scholarly work focuses on intellectual, cultural and literary history in the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular interest in German realism, literary and aesthetic theory, poet Heinrich Heine, philosophers Freidrich Nietzsche and Jürgen Habermas, and Vergangenheitsbewältigung — which relates to the post-1945 literary movement in Germany.

Recent books Holub has authored include Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere, and Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism. His latest work, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions, was recently published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

“I have always agreed with Clark Kerr’s judgment that the quality of a university depends on the quality of its faculty,” Holub said, referring to the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. “For this reason, as an administrator I see my chief role as facilitating what faculty want to do in their research and teaching."