Keywords: Romantic Ecocriticism - Cultural Plant Studies - Literary Animal Studies
Affiliation: Associate Professor of Modern German Literature with a Focus on Romanticism Studies, Department of German Studies and Its Didactics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
My work on “Umwelt” pertains to three main research fields and interests:
1. Romantic Ecocriticism
I approach Romanticism as an artistic and philosophical movement that developed ways of ecological thinking much more diverse than what came to be termed “ecology” in the second half of the nineteenth century; in this respect, I am particularly interested in how interactions with plants shaped new ways of relating to the more-than-human world – ways that can be pinned down in Romantic literatures and arts; see, e.g., Wasserlandschaften. Ökologien des Fluiden um 1800 (ed. Roland Borgards, Frederike Middelhoff and Barbara Thums, Metzler, 2023).
2. Cultural Plant Studies
Related to my interest in new modes of ecological thinking in the Romantic period, one of my major concerns is to further the study of how female writers contributed to Romantic ecologies with practices of reading, writing, translating, gardening and thinking with vegetal beings; another research focus is related to the question of how contemporary plant theory is informed by Romantic natural philosophy. Cf., among others, The Stories Plants Tell (ed. Frederike Middelhoff, Arnika Peselmann, Wayne State UP, 2023).
3. Literary Animal Studies
Nonhuman animals abound in literary fiction; in my research, I aim to show not only how animals impact literary forms and story-telling practices but also how fiction contributes to knowledges about nonhuman animals. My book on the entanglements of animal autobiography, zoology and the animal protection movement in “the long 19th century” (Literarische Autozoographien, Metzler, 2020) is a case in point.
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/Middelhoff
Photo Credit: © Stefanie Wetzel/Forschungskolleg Bad Homburg