Ella Wilhelm received her PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago in 2023. Her current project analyzes the function and significance of the terms "world" and "universe" around 1800 to describe aesthetic experience (as entry into a new world, relation to the universe) and to theorize aesthetic form by way of different cosmic metaphors. Though specializing in Romanticism, Ella works on the relationship between aesthetic and media theory and practice across time periods and disciplines. She has previously worked on Reformation media culture and theology, and has an article forthcoming on recognition and its grounds in Sophoclean tragedy. In the Department of Germanic Studies, Ella currently teaches classes on fairy tales, the Romantic conception of nature in aesthetic theory and practice, and the "poetics of money" from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the College Humanities Core, she teaches in the Media Aesthetics sequence.