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Department of German,
Russian and East European Studies

Meike Werner

Associate Professor of German and European Studies
Director of Graduate Studies: German Studies

Meike Werner is Associate Professor of German and European Studies, Acting Chair of the Department of German, Russian and East European Studies, Chair of the Department of French & Italian, and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of German, Russian & East European Studies. 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 With a passion for archives, Werner’s research is often focused on non-canonical forms of writing, and on unpublished letters and diaries.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 who go on to work in literary archives in Germany and elsewhere.

Werner’s books include Eduard Berend und Heinrich Meyer Briefwechsel, 1938-1972 (2013), Moderne in der Provinz (2003), and special issues for the Germanic Review and Internationale Archiv für die Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL). In addition, she is the co-editor of The Art of Dreams (2016), of German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium (2002), 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 »Young Intellectuals in the Making«, the critical edition of the correspondence of the Goethe-scholar and public intellectual Wilhelm Flitner and with Christian Damböck and Günther Sandner on an edited volume, Logischer Empirismus, Lebensreform und die deutsche Jugendbewegung | Logical Empiricism, Life Reform, and the German Youth Movement.

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 the Outstanding Graduate Mentoring Award at Vanderbilt University.

Meike Werner is president of the American Friends of Marbach (AFM).

Specializations

19th and 20th centuries German culture and literature, modernism, print media, intellectual history, history of German Studies in the U.S.


Representative Publications

Books

  • Ein Gipfel für Morgen. Kontroversen 1917/18 um die Neuordnung Deutschlands nach dem Krieg auf Burg Lauenstein, ed. Meike G. Werner (Marbacher Schriften NF, ed. Sandra Richter, Ulrich von Bülow and Anna Kinder, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021).
  • The Art of Dreams. Representations and Reflections, ed. with Barbara Hahn (Paradigms, Vol. 4, ed. Rüdiger Campe and Paul Fleming, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
  • Eduard Berend und Heinrich Meyer Briefwechsel, 1938-1972, ed. Meike G. Werner. Marbacher Schriften. Neue Folge, Bd. 10, ed. Ulrich Raulff, Ulrich von Bülow and Marcel Lepper (Göttingen: Wallstein 2013).
  • Moderne in der Provinz. Kulturelle Experimente im Fin de Siècle Jena (Modernity in the Provice. Cultural Experiments in Fin de Siècle Jena. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003).
  • German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium. Co-ed. with Stephen D. Dowden (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002).
  • Karl Korsch, Briefe 1908-1939, vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Karl Korsch. Co-ed. with Michael Buckmiller, and Michel Prat (Amsterdam and Hannover: Stichting beheer IISG/Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, December 2001).
  • Romantik, Revolution & Reform. Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag im Epochenkontext 1900-1949. Co-ed. with Justus H. Ulbricht (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999).

Essays

  • »Frau mit Ehe. Elisabeth Czapski, verheiratete Flitner«, in Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte XIV/4 (2020).
  • »How far away was L.A.? Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades 1942/43. Rede zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung Thomas Mann in Amerika«, in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 63 (2019), 463-472.
  • »Hans Magnus Enzensberger oder die Verabschiedung des literarischen Provinzialismus,« special topic with Jan Bürger for IASL 42.2 (2019): 380-436.
  • »Tanz der Gedanken und Gefühle. Karl Korsch in Jena: Freistudentenschaft | Serakreis | Sommerakademie,« in Karl Korsch zwischen Rechts- und Sozialwissenschaft (Jenaer Schriften zum Recht), ed. Jürgen Seifert and Klaus Vieweg (Stuttgart: Boorberg Verlag, 2017), 11-28.
  • »Introduction: Remembering the Kahlschlag«, Introduction to special section: Remembering the Kahlschlag: Peter Suhrkamp and His Publishing House after 1945, Germanic Review 89 (2014): 305-307.
  • »Jugend im Feuer. August 1914 im Serakreis«, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte VIII/2 (2014): 19-34.
  • »Warum 1913? Zur Fortsetzung des Themenschwerpunkts ›Das Jahr 1913 in Geschichte und Gegenwart‹«. Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) 38.2 (2013): 443-451.
  • »Modern Jena as a Model of Cultural Regeneration in Wilhelmine Germany«. Journal of the History of Ideas 74.2 (2013): 267-288.
  • »The Place of German Modernism«. With Stephen D. Dowden. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History. Ed. Helmut Walser Smith (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 481-498.
  • »Germanistik in the Shadow of the Holocaust. The Changing Profile of the Professoriate, 1942-1970.« In The History of German Studies in the U.S.A. Ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (New York: MLA, 2003), 409-20.
  • “Book History as the History of Literature,” Germanic Review 76.4 (2001): 283-89.