Jack David Zipes (born June 7, 1937) is a professor emeritus of German, comparative literature, and cultural studies, who has published and lectured on German literature, critical theory, German Jewish culture, children's literature, and folklore. In the latter part of his career he translated two major editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and focused on fairy tales, their evolution, and their social and political role in civilizing processes. According to Zipes, fairy tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society". His arguments are avowedly based on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and more recently theories of cultural evolution. Education and positions Jack David Zipes was born on June 7, 1937, in New York City, to Celia (Rifkin) and Phillip P. Zipes. He received a BA in political science from Dartmouth College in 1959 and an MA in English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1960. From there, Zipes studied at the University of Munich in 1962 and the University of Tübingen in 1963. He earned his PhD in comparative literature (with a dissertation on the Romantic hero in German and American literature) from Columbia in 1965. It was published as a book, The Great Refusal: Studies of the Romantic Hero in German and American Literature in 1970 and was influenced by the works of Herbert Marcuse. After teaching American literature at the University of Munich (1966-1967), Zipes taught German literature and drama, comparative folklore and literary theory (specializing in the Frankfurt School) at New York University (1967-1972), the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (1972-1986) and the University of Florida (1986-1989) before moving to the department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, where he was department chair (1994-1998) and is currently professor emeritus of German. While teaching at the University of Minnesota, he founded and directed Neighborhood Bridges at the Children's Theater Company, a nationally and internationally acclaimed storytelling program for children, from 1997 to 2008. In addition, he co-founded the prominent journal of German studies, New German Critique, in 1972 and wrote or edited numerous essays for this journal until 1987. While at the University of Minnesota, he also became the director of the Center for German and European Studies, established with aid from the German cultural