John Fuegi papers

John Fuegi (1936- ) has been the Clara and Robert Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, since 1992. Fuegi holds a Ph. D. in comparative literature from the University of Southern California. In addition to the University of Maryland, he has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Harvard University, Wesleyan University, and at institutions in Berlin and Mainz, Germany, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Support for Fuegi's seventeen books and films on subjects as diverse as Virginia Woolf and twelfth-century nun Hildegard of Bingen was derived from grants and awards by the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Danish Film Institute. An authority on the life and work of Bertolt Brecht, Fuegi was the founder of the International Brecht Society in 1970 and edited the first fourteen volumes of its Proceedings. The collection contains materials related to Fuegi's research for the book Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of Modern Drama(1994) and his award-winning film about Danish novelist Ruth Berlau, Red Ruth: That Deadly Longing (1992). The collection consists primarily of manuscripts, research files, and publicity materials for Brecht and Company. Materials also document Fuegi's activities in the field of Brecht scholarship through articles and audio-visual materials, records of the International Brecht Society, and significant correspondence with scholar Eric Bentley. Other materials include correspondence, clippings, and photographs relating to Bertolt Brecht's collaborators such as the writers Elisabeth Hauptmann, Ruth Berlau, and Margarete Steffin, and the dramaturge Robert Vambery. While some of the materials in the collection are originals, others are photocopies of extremely rare material such as records from the Bertolt Brecht Archive at Harvard University.