UlI Baer
Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and writes frequently about photography, art, literature, and other subjects. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, he has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships. He met Caroline in college, and they attended graduate school at Yale together. They share a love of rowing and literature, which occupied much of their time in college and graduate school, and have been friends ever since.
He is the author of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth and Equality in the University (Oxford University Press); Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (MIT Press); The Dark Interval: Rilke's Letters for the Grieving Heart (New York: Random House and London: Bloomsbury), among other books, and the creator and host of a podcast on big ideas and great books: Think About It. He has published a novel (We Are But a Moment), a collection of short stories (Beggar's Chicken: Stories from Shanghai), and other books and numerous essays. As Editorial Director at Warbler Press, he has written new introductions for classic works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (co-written with Carol Gilligan), Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (co-written with Glenn Wallis), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and edited a series of original books on things that matter: Nietzsche, Rilke, Dickinson and Wilde on Love, all with Warbler Press.
Uli is a dad, an urban gardener, and practices Shaolin kung fu as a perpetual beginner. He lives in New York City.
Caroline Weber
Caroline Weber is a specialist of French literature, history, and culture. She is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City; she has also held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, she has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and French-American Foundations. New York Public Library Cullman fellowships. She met Uli in college, and they attended graduate school at Yale together. They share a love of rowing and literature, which occupied much of their time in college and graduate school, and have been friends ever since.
Caroline is the author of several books. Terror and Its Discontents (2003) and Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006) analyze the complex cultural politics of revolutionary France. The popular success of Queen of Fashion, a best-selling study of Marie Antoinette’s politically fraught clothing choices, led to writing assignments for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, The Washington Post, W magazine, and Vogue. In 2019, she held a writer’s residency at the Mount, Edith Warton’s estate in the Berkshires. In 2020 - 2021, Caroline will be a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center.
Her latest book, Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris (2018), won the French Heritage Society Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is currently at work on a sequel to that project: a social history of the decline and fall of the French aristocracy between 1894 and 1918, provisionally entitled Paris Quadrille.
Caroline lives in New York City and Connecticut with her husband and their four rescue dogs.