In 1972, he got his doctoral degree from Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on aesthetic premises in the literary criticism of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
For his Habilitation, the European qualification for a professorship, he wrote a study on American realism as a form of “staged reality” (Inszenierte Wirklichkeit).
Winfried Fluck taught as a guest professor at Princeton University and the Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, and he was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, the Advanced Studies Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and the Internationales Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum in Vienna.
He is a founding member of the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Universities Excellence Initiative, and is directing it together with Ulla Haselstein.
He is also co-director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College established and directed by Donald E. Pease.