Paul North’s research addresses diverse points in European philosophy, political theory, and literature. His first book, The Problem of Distraction (Stanford 2012), critiques the emphasis on mind in these traditions. He has published articles and reviews on Johann Nestroy, Franz Kafka, Soma Morgenstern, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin among others, and has recently co-edited a volume entitled Messianic Thought outside Theology (Fordham 2013). His present book, The Yield: Kafka’s Reformation of the Secular, reconstructs Kafka’s secret theological-political treatise from 1917. In his courses he teaches texts in the history of aesthetics, twentieth-century critical theory, phenomenology, and post-enlightenment German literature, with a focus on German-Jewish culture and history.