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ABOUT MY WORK
After an academic career of over thirty years that spanned two continents and allowed me to visit many other parts of the world, I continue to enjoy writing and researching. Growing up in Germany, I attended time-honored Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen and learned the ropes of the profession through my involvement in two interdisciplinary research projects funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: the Göttingen Center for the Advanced Study of Literary Translation (Göttinger Sonderforschungsbereich 309, “Die literarische Übersetzung”) and Göttingen Center for the Advanced Study of the Internationality of National Literatures (Göttinger Sonderforschungsbereich 529, “Internationalität nationaler Literaturen”). During that formative period, I discovered two topics that would continue to shape my research for many years to come:
● intercultural exchanges, the adaptive processes they entail, and their creative or innovative potential;
● the role of literature in the formation of collective identities.
Other topics that interest me and that I have revisited more than once include
● cross-fertilization between between “national” literatures as well as between literature and visual arts
(comparative studies) and
● interactions between the emerging sciences and the literary imagination during the long
eighteenth century.
Many of my publications, whether on cultural networks linking East and West, gardening and garden tourism, sociability, imaginary space travel, celebrity culture, female eccentrics, mermaids, pyrotechnics, nation-building in England, Scotland, and New Zealand, the emergence of modern meteorology, or on literary translation, touch on one or several of those multi-faceted topics.
My current book project examines how eighteenth-century gardening and landscape design prepared the ground for modern ideas of sustainability. |
