Information About My Research
Rethinking Cultural History in an Age of Displacement
An edited volume based in part on papers and discussions from the conference Germany from the Outside appeared with Bloomsbury Press in October 2022. Contributors are Gizem Arslan, Bettina Brandt, Claudia Breger, Veronika Füchtner, Berna Gueneli, Laurie Johnson, David Kim, Olivia Landry, B. Venkat Mani, Carl Niekerk, Anna Parkinson, Lucas Riddle, Azade Seyhan, Birgit Tautz, and Chunjie Zhang. The paperback edition comes out on April 18, 2024.
Romantic Cinema
My book Forgotten Dreams appeared in February 2016 with Camden House Press. More information is below. The paperback edition appeared in August 2019. A review by Sarah Griffin has appeared in Film Ireland here. A short review by Hans Helmut Prinzler is here. A review by Margit Grieb in Monatshefte is here. A review by Joseph Horsey in Studies in European Cinema is here.
Less Than Ideal Idealism
I presented work at the 2023 German Studies Association conference on the ways in which Idealist philosophy is embedded with and indebted to empiricism, faculty psychology, and political concerns. I'm grateful to seminar organizers Barbara Nagel and Silke Weineck.
Ethics and Storytelling
I am working on understanding the relation between ethics and narrative in contemporary film, photojournalism, and other documentary art that treats the veracity (or unreliability) of testimonies of conflict and societies in transition. I have taught a related class at Illinois on "Crime and Punishment in Documentary Film." We explored histories and depictions of retributive and restorative justice, among other topics. I am indebted to the work of Colleen Murphy (on transitional justice), Hanna Meretoja (on critical approaches to narrative), and Fritz Breithaupt (on the "dark side" of empathy). I have discussed some of this work at conferences, most recently at University of Illinois-Chicago.
Fairy Tales
Teaching the Grimms' fairy tales for two decades at the University of Illinois has led me to think about a project providing the kind of information and background I would have found useful back when I began. Working with an undergraduate researcher, I am starting to bring my interpretations of these very old stories (worked out in lectures over the years) together with historical work on the Grimms, Romanticism, and nationalism. The Grimms' massive folklore project, broadly speaking, was a defense of the power of storytelling--but this power comes at a cost. When we consider the Grimms' hugely popular tale collections, we should also consider what stories were not told, as well as larger questions of what cannot be encompassed in narrative, or what resists narration. In what ways does the sheer popularity of tales and their robust archetypal structures narrow our imaginations and our lives? To what extent do some of the most popular and often-remade tales prop up tired and abusive power structures? How does the Grimms' challenging blend of progressive thought and reactionary impulse help us think about ways to keep talking with one another despite disinformation and enormous political, economic, and cultural divides?
Politics, Populism, and Narrative
In 2018-2019 I co-directed a research project, with the support of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, on Politics and Narrative: A Narratology of Populism. The project brought undergraduate students together with scholars from different disciplines at Illinois to study contemporary European and American populism as a narrative phenomenon, and contributed to our mutual ongoing work on these topics.
Harry Potter
A class I teach at Illinois on "Harry Potter and Western Culture" motivated me to write an article, together with Carl Niekerk, entitled "Fascism in the Classroom" (in The Pedagogy of Harry Potter, eds. Marcie Panutsos Rovan and Melissa Wehler, Palgrave 2020).
General Interests and Background
I work on eighteenth- through twenty-first-century intellectual history, literature, philosophy, film, and culture, with particular emphasis on Romanticism and its afterlife. I earned the B.A. from Northwestern University and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. While completing the Ph.D. I taught at St. Louis Community College and at the College of Wooster. I have done research at the universities of Cologne, Regensburg, and Tübingen as well as at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach), and at the Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin). I am a recipient of Fulbright, Humboldt, and German Academic Exchange Service grants. I have been a member of the faculty at Vanderbilt University as well as at the University of Illinois, where I joined the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2001. In 2014-2015, I was Visiting Professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
I have published in English and in German, on a wide variety of topics and time periods, from the middle ages to the present. My publications address topics including the aesthetics of empirical psychology, the mind-body problem in early German romanticism and idealism, music composed during the Holocaust, Freud's nineteenth-century heritage, memory and literature, the epistemological function of psychosomata in literature and culture, and the vexed relation between romanticism, empathy, and alterity. My work engages intellectual history in order to make connections across eras and disciplines: what are the continuities and discontinuities between, say, Romanticism and our present? between philosophy and film? between discursiveness and experience?
In 2007, I was named Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois. This award recognizes exceptional research and teaching during the tenure probation period. In 2013 I was awarded a Mid-Career Faculty Release semester in a campus-wide competition. In 2016, I spent a semester studying psychology as part of the Illinois program for Faculty Fellows in a Second Discipline.
Information about my books
Germany from the Outside: Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement is an edited volume featuring the work of scholars in German culture, philosophy, literature, and film who look beyond traditional (albeit often-shifting) nation-state boundaries to explore what identity means in relation to language, social standing, and geopolitical location. Emphasizing current issues of migration, displacement, systemic injustice, and belonging, the volume explores opportunities for understanding and shaping community in new ways at a time when many are questioning the ability of cultural practices to effect structural change. The book is also a meta-reflection on the field of German Studies and on the humanities in the early 21st century. Can "German Studies" be loosened from the nation-state model at a time when our discipline (and the humanities in general) is losing students? The "nation" undeniably still exists and helps define what we do, but in ways that we can assess critically and constructively. The book's chapters reach a consensus that, in an age of displacement, practitioners in the humanities are makers and shapers of places--whether in pandemic-wary lecture halls, the Zoom classroom, our campuses, or our communities. Ultimately these can be places of refuge as well as of challenge and critique.
Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog engages with my career-long project of exploring and defining alternate trajectories of Romanticism. What is the meaning of Romanticism for our present? Forgotten Dreams engages this question by establishing a feedback loop between (partially forgotten) aspects of Romanticism, German cultural history, and the films of Werner Herzog (throughout his entire career). I use films as devices for better understanding Romanticism, while at the same time developing a revised understanding of Romanticism as a toolbox for working with cinema. I trace major conceptual threads in both Romanticism and Herzog’s films and note where and how they are interwoven in what I claim is a romantic cinema. The book is thus a contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of Romanticism as well as to film studies and Herzog scholarship. Forgotten Dreams appeared on February 1, 2016 with Camden House Press, in the series "Screen Cultures - German Film and the Visual" (eds. Johannes von Moltke/Michigan and Gerd Gemünden/Dartmouth). (The link to the book's page at Camden House is here. The page here at Amazon.com permits you to read some sections of the book.)
Aesthetic Anxiety (Rodopi, 2010) argued for the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity by analyzing uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film. I explored ways in which anxiety illuminates the mind-body problem in German cultural products from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, and emphasize Romanticism’s function as an engine of modernity.
A review of Aesthetic Anxiety on literaturkritik.de is available at:
http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=15034
A review of Aesthetic Anxiety appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of The German Quarterly (85.2), pp. 219-221.
The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism (Niemeyer, 2002) examines representations of memory and remembering in the 1790s, and argued that Romantic theories of memory reflect the insights not only of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and critical philosophy, but of contemporary psychology and of natural science.
Rethinking Cultural History in an Age of Displacement
An edited volume based in part on papers and discussions from the conference Germany from the Outside appeared with Bloomsbury Press in October 2022. Contributors are Gizem Arslan, Bettina Brandt, Claudia Breger, Veronika Füchtner, Berna Gueneli, Laurie Johnson, David Kim, Olivia Landry, B. Venkat Mani, Carl Niekerk, Anna Parkinson, Lucas Riddle, Azade Seyhan, Birgit Tautz, and Chunjie Zhang. The paperback edition comes out on April 18, 2024.
Romantic Cinema
My book Forgotten Dreams appeared in February 2016 with Camden House Press. More information is below. The paperback edition appeared in August 2019. A review by Sarah Griffin has appeared in Film Ireland here. A short review by Hans Helmut Prinzler is here. A review by Margit Grieb in Monatshefte is here. A review by Joseph Horsey in Studies in European Cinema is here.
Less Than Ideal Idealism
I presented work at the 2023 German Studies Association conference on the ways in which Idealist philosophy is embedded with and indebted to empiricism, faculty psychology, and political concerns. I'm grateful to seminar organizers Barbara Nagel and Silke Weineck.
Ethics and Storytelling
I am working on understanding the relation between ethics and narrative in contemporary film, photojournalism, and other documentary art that treats the veracity (or unreliability) of testimonies of conflict and societies in transition. I have taught a related class at Illinois on "Crime and Punishment in Documentary Film." We explored histories and depictions of retributive and restorative justice, among other topics. I am indebted to the work of Colleen Murphy (on transitional justice), Hanna Meretoja (on critical approaches to narrative), and Fritz Breithaupt (on the "dark side" of empathy). I have discussed some of this work at conferences, most recently at University of Illinois-Chicago.
Fairy Tales
Teaching the Grimms' fairy tales for two decades at the University of Illinois has led me to think about a project providing the kind of information and background I would have found useful back when I began. Working with an undergraduate researcher, I am starting to bring my interpretations of these very old stories (worked out in lectures over the years) together with historical work on the Grimms, Romanticism, and nationalism. The Grimms' massive folklore project, broadly speaking, was a defense of the power of storytelling--but this power comes at a cost. When we consider the Grimms' hugely popular tale collections, we should also consider what stories were not told, as well as larger questions of what cannot be encompassed in narrative, or what resists narration. In what ways does the sheer popularity of tales and their robust archetypal structures narrow our imaginations and our lives? To what extent do some of the most popular and often-remade tales prop up tired and abusive power structures? How does the Grimms' challenging blend of progressive thought and reactionary impulse help us think about ways to keep talking with one another despite disinformation and enormous political, economic, and cultural divides?
Politics, Populism, and Narrative
In 2018-2019 I co-directed a research project, with the support of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, on Politics and Narrative: A Narratology of Populism. The project brought undergraduate students together with scholars from different disciplines at Illinois to study contemporary European and American populism as a narrative phenomenon, and contributed to our mutual ongoing work on these topics.
Harry Potter
A class I teach at Illinois on "Harry Potter and Western Culture" motivated me to write an article, together with Carl Niekerk, entitled "Fascism in the Classroom" (in The Pedagogy of Harry Potter, eds. Marcie Panutsos Rovan and Melissa Wehler, Palgrave 2020).
General Interests and Background
I work on eighteenth- through twenty-first-century intellectual history, literature, philosophy, film, and culture, with particular emphasis on Romanticism and its afterlife. I earned the B.A. from Northwestern University and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. While completing the Ph.D. I taught at St. Louis Community College and at the College of Wooster. I have done research at the universities of Cologne, Regensburg, and Tübingen as well as at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach), and at the Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin). I am a recipient of Fulbright, Humboldt, and German Academic Exchange Service grants. I have been a member of the faculty at Vanderbilt University as well as at the University of Illinois, where I joined the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2001. In 2014-2015, I was Visiting Professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
I have published in English and in German, on a wide variety of topics and time periods, from the middle ages to the present. My publications address topics including the aesthetics of empirical psychology, the mind-body problem in early German romanticism and idealism, music composed during the Holocaust, Freud's nineteenth-century heritage, memory and literature, the epistemological function of psychosomata in literature and culture, and the vexed relation between romanticism, empathy, and alterity. My work engages intellectual history in order to make connections across eras and disciplines: what are the continuities and discontinuities between, say, Romanticism and our present? between philosophy and film? between discursiveness and experience?
In 2007, I was named Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois. This award recognizes exceptional research and teaching during the tenure probation period. In 2013 I was awarded a Mid-Career Faculty Release semester in a campus-wide competition. In 2016, I spent a semester studying psychology as part of the Illinois program for Faculty Fellows in a Second Discipline.
Information about my books
Germany from the Outside: Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement is an edited volume featuring the work of scholars in German culture, philosophy, literature, and film who look beyond traditional (albeit often-shifting) nation-state boundaries to explore what identity means in relation to language, social standing, and geopolitical location. Emphasizing current issues of migration, displacement, systemic injustice, and belonging, the volume explores opportunities for understanding and shaping community in new ways at a time when many are questioning the ability of cultural practices to effect structural change. The book is also a meta-reflection on the field of German Studies and on the humanities in the early 21st century. Can "German Studies" be loosened from the nation-state model at a time when our discipline (and the humanities in general) is losing students? The "nation" undeniably still exists and helps define what we do, but in ways that we can assess critically and constructively. The book's chapters reach a consensus that, in an age of displacement, practitioners in the humanities are makers and shapers of places--whether in pandemic-wary lecture halls, the Zoom classroom, our campuses, or our communities. Ultimately these can be places of refuge as well as of challenge and critique.
Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog engages with my career-long project of exploring and defining alternate trajectories of Romanticism. What is the meaning of Romanticism for our present? Forgotten Dreams engages this question by establishing a feedback loop between (partially forgotten) aspects of Romanticism, German cultural history, and the films of Werner Herzog (throughout his entire career). I use films as devices for better understanding Romanticism, while at the same time developing a revised understanding of Romanticism as a toolbox for working with cinema. I trace major conceptual threads in both Romanticism and Herzog’s films and note where and how they are interwoven in what I claim is a romantic cinema. The book is thus a contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of Romanticism as well as to film studies and Herzog scholarship. Forgotten Dreams appeared on February 1, 2016 with Camden House Press, in the series "Screen Cultures - German Film and the Visual" (eds. Johannes von Moltke/Michigan and Gerd Gemünden/Dartmouth). (The link to the book's page at Camden House is here. The page here at Amazon.com permits you to read some sections of the book.)
Aesthetic Anxiety (Rodopi, 2010) argued for the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity by analyzing uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film. I explored ways in which anxiety illuminates the mind-body problem in German cultural products from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, and emphasize Romanticism’s function as an engine of modernity.
A review of Aesthetic Anxiety on literaturkritik.de is available at:
http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=15034
A review of Aesthetic Anxiety appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of The German Quarterly (85.2), pp. 219-221.
The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism (Niemeyer, 2002) examines representations of memory and remembering in the 1790s, and argued that Romantic theories of memory reflect the insights not only of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and critical philosophy, but of contemporary psychology and of natural science.