David E. Wellbery joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2001 as the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor; he holds appointments in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Committee on Social Thought and the College. In 2005, Professor Wellbery was awarded the Research Prize (Forschungspreis) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of his scholarly achievement; in 2010 he received the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm-Prize awarded by the DAAD. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Leopoldina), the American Philosophical Society, and is a corresponding member of the Bayrische Akademie der Wissenschaften. In 2019, he received the Golden Goethe Medallion from the Goethe Society in Weimar in recognition of his contribution to scholarship on Goethe and, in 2023 he received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring. 

Professor Wellbery is the founding Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture at the University of Chicago. Two of his books are considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s Laocoön. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1984) and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 1996). Professor Wellbery’s current research project is a large-scale study of Goethe’s literary work entitled Goethe: Form and Thought. He is also preparing a study entitled Literary Interpretation: Studies in a Disappearing Art.