Asaf Angermann

Faculty Profile

Asaf Angermann is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of North Texas. He specializes in critical social philosophy, philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, philosophy of race and racism, philosophy of gender and sexuality, and aesthetics.

Born and raised in Israel, he studied at the Universities of Tel Aviv, Berlin, and London, and received his doctoral degree from the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany. He then crossed the pond for postdoctoral positions at the University of Toronto and at Yale University. Before coming to the University of North Texas, he has taught at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

He is the author of Damaged Irony: Kierkegaard, Adorno, and the Negative Dialectics of Critical Subjectivity (published in German with de Gruyter, 2014) and the editor of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence 1939-1969 (published in 2015 with Suhrkamp, Adorno and Scholem’s original German publisher, and in English translation, published with Polity Press in 2021, with a new introduction by the editor). The correspondence, which is now included in the official series of Adorno’s Collected Works: Letters and Correspondence, was enthusiastically reviewed by philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who described the correspondence as a “documentation of one of the finest hours of German-Jewish intellectual history – after the Holocaust. The comments by editor Asaf Angermann, meticulously researched, are a reminder of the widely ramified network of relationships between a grand generation of German-Jewish intellectuals.” The book has received numerous favorable reviews in German, Spanish, Italian, and American newspapers and journals, including the New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Jewish Review of Books, and others. Additionally, he has translated into Hebrew (from German) Theodor W. Adorno’s book Education to Autonomy and Responsibility, and provided the book with a comprehensive introduction and commentary.

Dr. Angermann’s recent work has appeared in journals such as Critical Philosophy of Race, Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy, New German Critique, and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, as well as in edited volumes such as The Blackwell Companion to Adorno, and The Oxford Handbook of Adorno. Currently, he is completing new work on Critical Theory of Race, Gender, and Sexuality as well as on Black-Jewish relations.