SANDRA RUDNICK LUFT
Professor of Humanities
San Francisco State University
srluft@sfsu.edu

Professor Sandra R. Luft received her M.A. in both Philosophy and English from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from the History of Ideas Program at Brandeis Her teaching and research interests center on the modern European (sixteenth to twentieth centuries) history of ideas, with an emphasis on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the interdisciplinary study of ideas and culture. For many years the focus of her research has been the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who, reacting against the modern rationalist-scientific conception of knowledge, delimited knowledge to what humans had made, their own historical-cultural world. Her book, Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the "New Science" between Modern and Postmodern, was published by Cornell University Press, 2003. Recently, her teaching has focused on contemporary postmodern literature, particularly the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, as well as the writings of Hannah Arendt.