Dirk Johnson

Office Hours : MWF 10:00 -10:45 and MW 1:00-2:00, and by appointment, New Cabell Hall 242

Dirk Johnson was born in Germany on a U.S. military base — his father served as a doctor and his mother is a German native. He was raised in New York City, graduating from Trinity High School in 1981. Summers spent with German relatives in Kronach, a small medieval town in Upper Franconia, Bavaria, gave him an early command of the language.

He double-majored in German and history, both with high honors, at Bowdoin College, and studied at the University of Munich in 1983–84. After graduating, he spent seven years working and studying in Bonn, earning a Magister in political science, philosophy, and German from the University of Bonn in 1989. While in Bonn, he served as a student and research assistant to political scientist Dr. Hans-Peter Schwarz, translated a book by political commentator Dr. Gerd Langguth, and worked as Office Manager of the Wall Street Journal/Europe.

Johnson returned to the United States in 1992, working in New York City before beginning doctoral study at Indiana University in 1994. He completed his M.A. in 1996 and his Ph.D. in German Studies in 2000, then taught for a year as Lecturer in German at IU. In 2001 he joined the faculty of Hampden-Sydney College as assistant professor of German, retiring from teaching there in 2026. He now teaches German in the General Faculty at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville with his wife and two sons.

His research on Nietzsche and Darwin has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and been presented at Cambridge, St Andrews, and the Technical University of Berlin, among other venues; his monograph, Nietzsche's Anti-Darwinism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Alongside this work, he has written and presented on German film, including a contribution to a 2014 University of Kentucky Press volume on The Lives of Others.