Professor Weber received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in 1988. She is the Chair of the Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies and an Affiliate Professor of Religious Studies. Her research interests include French philosophy and theory; psychoanalysis and trauma-studies; German Judaism of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; nineteenth- and twentieth- century German literature. She is the author of Das Vergessen(e). Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren (1997), the editor of several works by Jacques Derrida, and German translator of texts by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Félix Guattari and Verfolgung und Trauma. In 2006 she collaborated with other UC Santa Barbara faculty on a “Critical Issues in America” project titled “Torture and the Future: Perspectives from the Humanities.” Her current research and teaching focus on the ways in which literature and critical theory can contribute to an exploration of trauma, of human rights and their violations, and to a meaningful reflection on concepts whose definitions have become, in the contemporary context, more and more uncertain, including the concepts of "the human,” “democracy,” “justice,” “rights.”