Paul A. Kottman, assistant professor of comparative literature at Lang, has published two new books, Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare from the Johns Hopkins University Press and Philosophers on Shakespeare from Stanford University Press.

In Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare , Kottman offers a new and compelling account of tragedy as seen in four of Shakespeare’s mature plays—As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. Firmly rooted in the tradition of reading Shakespeare philosophically, this bold work is the first sustained interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy since Stanley Cavell’s work on skepticism and A. C. Bradley’s century-old Shakespearean Tragedy.

Philosophers on Shakespeare  is the first volume to bring together the engagements that influential thinkers—including Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Benjamin, Marx, Schmitt, Lukács, Derrida, Cavell, and Heller—have had with Shakespeare. The book comes at a time when academic Shakespeare studies is shifting from a historicist and cultural materialist focus toward a renewed interest in theoretical readings of the plays.