Born: 1969.

Education: Konstanz University, BA (equiv.) 1992, philosophy and comparative literature; University of Bologna, certificate; UC Santa Barbara/UC Irvine, MA; Harvard University, PhD, comparative literature, 1998.

Puchner has been assistant professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University; associate professor of English, Cornell University; associate professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University; H. Gordon Garbedian Chair in English and comparative literature, Columbia University; Professor of English and comparative literature, Harvard University; and is currently Byron and Anita Wien Chair in drama and in English and comparative literature, Harvard.

Publications

Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality, and Drama (2002), Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (2006; winner of the MLA's James Russell Lowell Award), The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (2010), The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization (2017), and The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with the Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate (2020).

He has published essays in the London Review of Books, Raritan Review, N+1, Yale Journal of Criticism, The Drama Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, New Literary History, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Journal, among others. His edited books and introductions include Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (2003), Lionel Abel's Tragedy and Metatheatre (2003), The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (2005), and Modern Drama: Critical Concepts (2007). He is the coeditor of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (2006) and The Norton Anthology of Drama (2009) and the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

Influential articles include “Screeching Voices: Avant-Garde Manifestos in the Cabaret,” in Avant-Garde Critical Studies (2001); “Kafka's Anti-theatrical Gestures,” The Germanic Review (2003); “Debord and the Theater of the Situationists,” Theatre Research International (2004);