Faculty research spans European, German, and Russian cultural and intellectual history from the eighteenth century to the present, with particular strengths in the history of ideas and political thought.
This includes editorial work on the Hannah Arendt critical edition and the interplay of literature, visual art, and material culture in European modernity. Some faculty work on uniting archival and print-cultural approaches to German literary and intellectual history, modernism, and the history of the discipline itself, while our historians of modern Germany and Russia bring expertise in nationalism, religious conflict, political culture, and biography.
The department’s reach extends to media studies, film, and aesthetic theory, to gender and sexuality studies, contemporary Germanophone and Russian literature, and questions of diversity and intercultural citizenship in language and culture.
See highlights of our faculty research below.
Lutz Koepnick
Lutz Koepnick is the Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies and a professor of cinema and media arts. His recent book projects have crossed many different borders and intellectual territories. Koepnick works on questions of time, duration, and attention in contemporary art and cinema; on blockbuster filmmakers such as Michael Bay and art house champions such as Werner Herzog; and on figurations of resonance, vibrant materiality, and hospitality in the work of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson and other people often somewhat uneasily identified as sound artists.
Through the podcast Art of Interference, he explored the role of “interference” in modern art, visual culture, science, philosophy, and psychology to rethink what it might take to be human in face of the human-made disasters of the Anthropocene. His research is driven by deep-seated curiosity about how different artistic mediums and media technologies shape our ways of attending to matters of the world and how art—“high” or “low,” difficult or accessible—can disrupt what we typically take for granted.
Jim McFarland
Jim McFarland is an associate professor of German studies and cinema and media arts. Long interested in how art and philosophy persevere in a meaningless world, his research investigates transcendental thinking and the critical philosophies that have emerged more recently from that European tradition of reflection. McFarland is interested in forms of cultural disintegration and ideological reactions to the loss of human community. These reactions can be something as dangerous as a political movement or as transient as a movie audience.
He edited the Hannah Arendt’s manuscripts for the Critical Edition and raised questions of philological practice, and in turn pursued an old investigation into what he calls the “zombie image”: the anthropophagic contagious corpse familiar from movies, television, and video games.
Meike G. Werner
Meike G. Werner is Centennial Chair of German Studies and Professor of European Studies. Her scholarship spans German literature, print media, intellectual history, and the history of Germanistik from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. Drawing on her passion for archival research, Werner’s work frequently explores non-canonical forms of writing, with particular attention to unpublished letters and diaries.
In addition to authoring and editing numerous books, Werner has co-curated two exhibitions in Jena, Germany, and has received numerous awards and honors for her scholarship. She also serves as co-editor of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) and Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur / Studies and Texts on the Social History of Literature (STSL).
Christoph Zeller
Christoph Zeller is a professor of European and German studies. A trained literary scholar and historian, he is interested in the metamorphosis of media. His research is dedicated to the ways we see, hear, and imagine the world through signs—from the spoken and written word to the representation of digitized code on screens. He deems aesthetics a salient feature of the human condition.
Zeller engages in projects that ask what we mean when we say “authentic” and what is included when we speak of “values.” What kind of values guide our actions; in what ways will values change under the condition of technological progress?
Works include: an ongoing analysis of the cultural skill of “collecting;” a monograph on “values” and their derivatives (e.g. money, knowledge, art, and garbage) in German literature and art between 1890 and 1933; and a book-length study of depictions of the archive in eighteenth and nineteenth century German literature.