Ullrich Langer is an American Renaissance literary and intellectual historian and academic. He is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the College of Letters and Science of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Langer is most known for his contributions to French literature and has worked particularly on Renaissance intellectual history and 16th-century poetry and prose. He has authored and edited numerous books and volumes, including Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne, Lyric Humanity from Virgil to Flaubert, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance and The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne.
Education
In 1973, Langer graduated from the University of Washington with a B.A. in Philosophy, and subsequently obtained a M.A. in French Literature from the same university in 1975. Following studies in French Literature at Universität Tübingen in 1976, he proceeded to conduct his doctoral research at Université de Montpellier and attained a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literature from Princeton University in 1980.
Career
Following his Ph.D., Langer began his academic career as assistant professor of French at Bryn Mawr College in 1980 and went on to hold an appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in 1985 where he was promoted to associate professor of French in 1988. Since 2017, he has been serving as Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became Emeritus Professor in 2020.
Langer served as a Director of the Center for Early Modern Studies, an Interim Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Work
With a particular interest in moral philosophy and political theory, Langer has explored the realm of French literature, with a specific focus on 16th-century poetry and prose, as well as Renaissance intellectual history, political thought, and moral philosophy.
Freedom, creativity, and theology in Renaissance literature
Langer's literary exploration has focused on the connection between freedom, creativity, and theology in Renaissance literature, while also analyzing the power of lyric representation in addressing ethical and aesthetic questions from a humanist perspective. He argued that French and Italian Renaissance literature could be understood in light of late medieval scholasticism, particularly nominalist theology. He discussed issues such as the new status of the poet and the reader, in comparison to medieval antecedents, and through concepts of causality, necessity, freedom and merit. In the book, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance he explored the connection between creativity, freedom, and nominalist theology. In his perspective, nominalist theology offered a collection of concepts that aided in comprehending the intellectual context of freedom. God, the secular sovereign, and the poet were all relieved of external necessity in their relationships with their respective worlds. He highlighted the "modern" aspects of fifteenth and sixteenth-century literature by examining contemporary notions of freedom.