Goethe-Fellows

Frederike Middelhoff

Professor of modern German literature with a focus on Romanticism, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

2022–2026 (Goethe-Fellow)

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Romanticism and Migration. A history of knowledge«

Project outline:

The project investigates how »migration« is imagined in the literary and cultural period of Romanticism (ca. 1790–1850) and examines the dimensions of migratory mobility in relation to the history of knowledge. The project sheds light on how migration was aestheticized around the turn of the century and situates these ideas and representations in relation to legal decrees, political debates, philosophical treatises, and scientific observations on movements of e/migration. As such, the project addresses a significant gap in the field of German studies research. On the one hand, this field lacks comprehensive studies on the aesthetic negotiation of emigration, flight, and exile around 1800 in the German-speaking world. On the other hand, literary representations of migration in the Romantic period have not yet been analyzed from a perspective informed by the history of knowledge and have not yet been connected to the diverse areas of discourse in which migration became an object of knowledge in the »Sattelzeit« (Frederike Middelhoff)

Scholarly profile of Frederike Middelhoff

Frederike Middelhoff has been a professor of modern German literature with a focus on Romanticism at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2020. She received her PhD from the Würzburg University in 2019. Her thesis on »Literarische Autozoographien. Figurationen des autobiographischen Tieres (1789–1922)« was awarded the Bayern prize in 2019. Together with Irini Siouti, Frederike Middelhoff chairs the study group »Migration|Knowledge«, which is based at the Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre of Goethe University. Frederike Middelhoff is co-editor of the book series Neue Romantikforschung, published by the Metzler Verlag.

Website:
Please find more information about Frederike Middelhoff here.

Main areas of research:

Romanticism, Cultural and Literary Animal Studies, Literature and Knowledge, migration theories and histories, Mobility Studies, Plant Studies, Life Writing

Selected publications:

(ed. with Martina Wernli), Noch Zukunft haben. Zum Werk Karoline von Günderrodes, Berlin: Metzler 2024.
(ed. with Jennifer Leetsch and Miriam Wallraven), Configurations of Migration. Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media, Berlin: De Gruyter 2023.
»Thinking and Writing with Leaves: Poplar Sympoetics in Romanticism«, in: Green Letters (2022), read online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2029718.
»Romantische Zugvogelfiktionen. Auf den literarischen Fährten gefiederter Gefährten«, in: Ursula Seeber, Veronika Zwerger, Doerte Bischoff, Carla Swiderski (eds.): Mensch und Tier in Reflexionen des Exils, Berlin, Boston, New York: De Gruyter 2021, pp. 29–52.
»R/Emigration verhindern. ›Heimat‹ im Kontext der Auswanderung von 1816/17«, in: The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory (2021) 96:3, pp. 256–275.
(ed. with Jessica Ullrich), Tiere und Migration (= Tierstudien 19), Berlin: Neofelis 2021.
Literarische Autozoographien. Figurationen des autobiographischen Tieres im langen 19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag 2020.

Frederike Middelhoff

Scholarly profile of Frederike Middelhoff

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