Since 1994 he has served as founding member of the newly established European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, East of Berlin.
Haverkamp was a member and co-editor of the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik in its later phase, 1979-1996.
Under the influence of the Yale School of deconstruction (Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida), he developed the Konstanz School's Rezeptionsästhetik (Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauß, Wolfgang Preisendanz) from a theory of literary response (Reader-response criticism) to a theory of literary latency.
Relevant literary authors include Ovid, Shakespeare and Keats, Hölderlin, Joyce and Beckett.
He is a regular contributor and editor of Texte zur Kunst (Berlin) und Law and Literature (Berkeley).