Professor
English Department, St. John's Liberal Arts and Sciences
St. John Hall, Room B-16A
Queens campus
(718) 990-5614
maertzg@stjohns.edu
Education
Ph.D., 1988, Harvard University, English and American Literature
and Language
1986-88, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitdt Heidelberg, Germanistisches
Seminar
A.M., 1984, Harvard University, English and American Literature and
Language
A.M., 1983, Harvard University, Comparative Literature
B.A., 1981, Northwestern University, Comparative Literature
Profile
Gregory Maertz’s scholarship and teaching are divided between
Romanticism (theory, poetry, fiction) and Fascism Studies, in
particular the visual arts of the Third Reich and intersections
between Classical Modernism and Nazi Modernism. His major
publications seek to elucidate his discovery of nearly 10,000 works
of art produced in Nazi Germany and the previously hidden archives
of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst.
Professor Maertz has recently become active as a curator of
museum exhibitions focusing on the “lost” official Modernist art of
the Third Reich, the recovery of which and restoration to the
twentieth-century canon is the focus of his research. The first of
these exhibitions, Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen
1930-1945, opened at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin in
January 2007. In 2010 his exhibition, Art in the Third Reich, opens
at the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum.
Major honorific fellowships have supported his research in the
visual arts, including NEH, IAS, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, CASVA,
ACLS, and National Humanities Center fellowships. At St. John’s he
has been recognized as a finalist for Student Government Teacher of
the Year (1998) and received multiple Faculty Recognition Awards,
Summer Research Grants, and Seed Grants.