After growing up in Eugene, Oregon, Robert Deam Tobin received his AB in German Literature from Harvard College in 1983 and his MA and PhD in German Literature from Princeton University in 1987 and 1990 respectively. Along the way, he spent his junior year at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and worked on his dissertation for two years at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg. Professor Tobin is the Henry J. Leir Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures at Clark University as of the fall of 2008. Funded by the Ridgefield Foundation, the Leir Chair is an innovative new position designed to bring together scholars of foreign languages and cultures, reach out to other disciplines, and ensure that the study of foreign languages and cultures is present in the intellectual discussions of the community. Tobin’s first full-time position was at Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington, where he worked for 18 years. At Whitman College, he served as associate dean of the faculty and chair of the humanities and was named Cushing Eells Professor of the Humanities. Professor Tobin’s current research interests center on questions of gender and sexuality, particularly gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. He is especially interested in how legal and medical discourses interact with literary and cultural rhetoric about sexuality, above all in the German tradition. He is currently completing a book on nineteenth-century central European discourses related to homosexuality, tentatively titled “Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex.” Tobin’s additional areas of expertise include German literature of the Age of Goethe, Thomas Mann, German film and European popular culture (especially the phenomenon known as Eurovision). His research has been funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (the DAAD) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2000, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Freie Universität in Berlin; in 2004-5, he was a Rockefeller Fellow in the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights at Columbia University. Selected PublicationsBooks: Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Doctor’s Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Edited Volumes: (with Ivan Raykoff), A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Selected Essays: “Why is Tadzio a Boy? Perspectives on Homoeroticism in Death in Venice,” Thomas Mann, Death in Venice: A New Translation. Background and Contexts. Criticism, ed. Clayton Koelb (New York: Norton, 1994) 207-32. “In and Against Nature: Goethe on Homosexuality and Heterotextuality,” Outing Goethe and His Age, ed. Alice Kuzniar (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 94-110. “The Life and Work of Thomas Mann: A Gay Perspective,” in Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, ed. Naomi Ritter (New York: Bedford Books, 1998) 225-244. “Masochism and Identity,” in One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts, Psychoanalysis and Culture 10, ed. Michael Finke and Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) 33-52. "Morality and German Film: The Berlinale 2000." Film and History 30.2 (2000) 75-77. "Prescriptions: Medicine and Literature." Mosaic 33.4 (December 2000) 179-92. “Postmoderne Männlichkeit: Michael Roes und Matthias Politicki.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik Neue Folge 2 (2002) 324-333. "Making Way for the Third Sex: Male-Male Desire in Thomas Mann's Early Short Fiction," in A Companion to German Realism, 1848-1900, ed. Todd Kontje (Rochester: Camden House, 2002) 307-38. "Venus von Samoa: Rasse und Sexualität im deutschen Südpazifik," in Kolonialismus als Kultur : Literatur, Medien, Wissenschaft in der deutschen Gründerzeit des Fremden, ed. Alexander Honold and Oliver Simons (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2002) 192-220. “Politics, Tragedy, and ‘Six Feet Under’: Camp Aesthetics and Mourning in Post-AIDS America,” in Reading “Six Feet Under”: Television to Die For, ed. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe (New York: Palgrave, 2005) 87-95. “Kertbeny’s ‘Homosexuality’ and the Language of Nationalism,” in Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and Sexuality, ed. by Margaret Sönser Breen and Fiona Peters (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) 3-18. | 
