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Meike Werner

Centennial Chair of German Studies | Professor of German and European Studies
Director, Max Kade Center for European and German Studies

Meike Werner is Professor of German and European Studies, Director of the Max Kade Center for German and European Studies, and director of Graduate Studies in German. In 1996, she received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in German at Yale University. After teaching at Brandeis University, she joined Vanderbilt University in 1997.

Werner has published on German literature, print media, intellectual history, and the history of Germanistik from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her teaching spans from the literature of the Middle Ages to early twentieth century modernism and the late twentieth century (post-wall) literature. She also teaches courses in European Studies and Jewish Studies. With a passion for archives, Werner’s research is often focused on non-canonical forms of writing, and on unpublished letters and diaries. She also teaches archival methods to graduate students, many of whom go on to work in literary archives in Germany and elsewhere.

Werner’s books include Gruppenbild mit Max Weber (2023), Peter Demetz. Was wir wiederlesen wollen. Literarische Essays 1960-2010 (2022); Ein Gipfel für Morgen (2021); Eduard Berend und Heinrich Meyer Briefwechsel, 1938-1972 (2013), Moderne in der Provinz (2003; English translation: Germany’s Other Modernism, 2023), and special issues for the Germanic Review, Goethe Yearbook, and Internationale Archiv für die Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL). In addition, she is the co-editor of Logischer Empirismus, Lebensreform und die deutsche Jugendbewegung | Logical Empiricism, Life Reform, and the German Youth Movement (2022); of The Art of Dreams (2016), of German Literature, Jewish Critics (2002), and of Romantik, Revolution & Reform. Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag im Epochenkontext 1900-1949 (1999), as well as Karl Korsch, Briefe 1908-1939 (2001). She is co-editor of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) and of Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (STSL) | Studies and Texts on the Social History of Literature

Werner also co-curated two exhibits in Jena, one commemorating the centenary of the Eugen Diederichs Verlag (1996) and one on Jenas Aufbruch in die Moderne (2003). Currently, she is working on a book, entitled »Katakombenzeit. Wilhelm Flitner in Hamburg 1929-1969«, and an edited volume on »The Persistence of Reading in the Digital Age«

Werner is the recipient of a number of awards from, among others, the Thyssen Foundation, the DFG (German Research Foundation), the German American Academic Council (GAAC), the Goethe Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute Vienna Circle and the Max Kade Foundation. In 2011, she was awarded Vanderbilt University’s Outstanding Graduate Mentoring Award, and in 2022 the Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award.