Peter Mann
Lecturer
Master of Liberal Arts Program
Bio
Peter Mann is a writer and historian of Modern Europe. He is the author of the novel THE TORQUED MAN (Harper, 2022), about the double life of an Irish spy in wartime Berlin, and named one of The New Yorker's best books of 2022. His second novel PACIFICA is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2025.
Mann is interested in late 19th- and early 20th-century literature and history, especially where they intersect with politics and the absurd, though he happily teaches across a broad swath, from Gilgamesh and the Greeks to Cabeza de Vaca and Clarice Lispector. He is also a cartoonist, whose syndicated online weekly feature "The Quixote Syndrome" ran on GoComics from 2014-2021. Currently, he puts out comics on his Substack newsletter "Free Spirits Run Riot."
Mann teaches history and literature in the first-year Foundations sequence of the Stanford's Masters of Liberal Arts program as well as courses in Stanford Continuing Studies. Recent CSP courses include "Modernism in the Metropolis: Artist and Intellectuals in the European City, 1848-1945" and "Modernity and its Discontents: European Thought and Culture from Fin de Siècle to World War II."
Academic Appointments
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Lecturer, Master of Liberal Arts Program
Professional Education
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BA, Wesleyan University, History (2003)
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PhD, Stanford University, History and Humanities (2012)
2024-25 Courses
- Foundations I
MLA 101A (Aut) - Foundations II: the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
MLA 101B (Win) - Foundations III: the Enlightenment through Modernism
MLA 101C (Spr) -
Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- Foundations I
MLA 101A (Aut) - Foundations II: the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
MLA 101B (Win) - Foundations III: the Enlightenment through Modernism
MLA 101C (Spr)
2022-23 Courses
- Foundations I
MLA 101A (Aut) - Foundations II: the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
MLA 101B (Win) - Foundations III: the Enlightenment through Modernism
MLA 101C (Spr)
2021-22 Courses
- Foundations III: the Enlightenment through Modernism
MLA 101C (Spr)
- Foundations I
All Publications
- The Torqued Man Harper Collins. 2022
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Saving Europe in Spain: Jose Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on Quixote and the politics of self, nation and Europe
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES
2019; 49 (2): 108–42
View details for DOI 10.1177/0047244119838916
View details for Web of Science ID 000473512400002
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The good European in the Great War: Thomas Mann's Reflections of an Unpolitical Man and the politics of self, nation and Europe
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES
2017; 47 (1): 34-53
View details for DOI 10.1177/0047244116676677
View details for Web of Science ID 000398292900003