My research investigates concepts of sex and gender in German literature and intellectual history, concentrating on the nineteenth century. I also work on contemporary literature and the political novel.
Intellectual Profile
My research focuses on the history of concepts of sex and gender, particularly how they were used to think about language in disciplines like language science and philosophy. I explored this in my book, Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century, which argues that between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, ideas about sexual differences often shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, as linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, they not only deemed sex-based divisions to be necessary categories of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.
The book aims to show how such gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While I focus on how male scholars aligned language with masculinity, I also uncover how women responded, highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities. I also connect this history to debates about gendered language today.
New projects include an edited volume on the “Reinvention of Patriarchy” around 1800 and a book on contemporary political literature. Focusing on texts written by authors on both the left and the right, this project investigates the fate of the political novel in the twenty-first century.
I also co-run the German Studies Scholarly Seminar at the Newberry Library: https://www.newberry.org/german-studies-seminar
Work with Students
Students working with me have written on topics such as: sexuality in Realism and Modernism; play in German literature; women’s writing; representations of the Holocaust in German history textbooks; and the rise of the right in East Germany.
Selected Publications
Book
Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Articles
“Knowing Gender in Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch.” The German Quarterly 97:3 (2024): 354-369.
“Father is Always Uncertain: J. J. Bachofen and the Epistemology of Patriarchy.” Monatshefte 116.1 (2024): 44-65.
“The Sex of Language: Jacob Grimm on Grammatical Gender,” MLN 136 (2021): 770-793.
“The Ambivalent Didacticism of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen.” The Germanic
Review 94:4 (2019): 345-362.
Teaching
Recent Courses:
- Robert Musil: Altered States
- Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: On “Women’s Writing”
- Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik: Poetry and Crisis
- Writing Gender
- Fictions of Patriarchy
- Get Cultured in Nine Weeks: Historical Perspectives on Art and Education
