Wolfgang Natter has served as ASPECT (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought) director at Virginia Tech since 2005. During that time he has overseen program developments leading to approval and implementation of its Ph.D. and Certificate programs. Currently professor of political science, he previously earned tenure and promotion in the disciplines of Geography as well as German Studies. Prior to his arrival to Virginia Tech, he was co-founder and long term director of the University of Kentucky’s Committee on Social Theory, as well as visiting professor at the University of Jena, Leibniz Professor at the Center for Advanced Study at Leipzig University, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

Dr Natter’s strategic planning initiatives have to a considerable degree been informed by his own experiences in, and consequently, commitments to interdisciplinary education. He has been particularly interested in strengthening disciplinary based scholarship and fostering interdisciplinary responses to significant problems by facilitating integrative teaching, learning, and research among and between the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools, very much in keeping with recommendations also made (among others) by sources as disparate as the most recent AAU reports on the status of the humanities, and on interdisciplinary research, the Rand report on the 21st Century knowledge economy, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and publications of individual professional associations. A forceful advocate of the virtues of team-teaching for fostering authentic interdisciplinary learning and discovery, Natter has taught with faculty in disciplines and fields such as African-American Studies, Appalachian Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, Art History, Business and Economics, English, Geography, History, Humanities, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

His teaching interests encompass various aspects of political, social, and cultural theory. Recent seminar topics have included Globalization and Sustainability; Democracy and Democratic Theory; Neoliberalism and Society; Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School; Space, Identity and Representation; Alternative Political Theory; and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Methodology. He is author of Literature at War: Representing “the time of greatness” in Germany, 1914-1940 (Yale), and co-editor of Postmodern Contentions: Politics, Epochs, Space; Objectivity and its Other; and The Social and Political Body (Guilford). He has edited several special journal issues, including on the theme of Political Ecology, Territoriality and Scale (Geojournal). Recent articles have focused on film and critical whiteness studies; on identity and globalization ‘from below;’ on civil society and democracy; on ‘the old’ and ‘the new’ cultural geography; and German Geopolitics of the 1920s and 1930s.” To read his most recent article, Is Universality the Object of Globalization?: Political Geographies of Contingent Universality, see here. Among other ongoing projects, Natter is working on a book titled Friedrich Ratzel’s Spatial Turn.

Dr. Natter’ s research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschsdienst, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has organized over fifteen national and international conferences, and more than a dozen workshops. Other service activities include past duties on the editorial boards of disclosure, The Publications of the Modern Language Association, The Annals of American Geography, German Studies Review, and present duties as editorial board member of Social Geography, Aether, and Ethics, Place, Environment.