Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian at Stanford University. As a public intellectual and highly prolific writer, he contributes to fields as diverse as the histories of national literatures in Romance languages, Western philosophical traditions, and forms of aesthetic experience in twenty first-century everyday culture. He has published more than two thousand texts, translated into more than twenty languages. His latest books are Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012), Explosionen der Aufklärung: Diderot, Goya, Lichtenberg, Mozart (2013), After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), and Brüchige Gegenwart: Reflexionen und Reaktionen (2019).