Affiliation: The Ohio State University
Keywords: Ecocriticism/Environmental Humanities – Poetry – Criticism & Theory
May Mergenthaler’s research and teaching focus on German poetry and criticism from the 17th century to the present, literary theory, Early Romanticism, and Ecocriticism/Environmental Humanities, and nature writing. She is particularly interested in how language and poetic form shape and co-create our social and cultural ideas and perceptions and in research collaborations. Currently, she is writing a book on the functions, concepts, and figures of light in German poetry from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. May was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship as well as Ohio State’s Virginia Hull Award and Arts and Sciences Research award in support of this project. She is also co-editor (with H. Jackson) of the international journal Zæsur.Poesiekritik, which she co-founded in 2025. Her first book (2012) re-interprets Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of Romanticism as a – failed – universal dialogue. She has co-edited volumes on the cultural public sphere (2015, wih B. Fischer) and on manuscript cultures (2025, with D. Schäfer), and is currently completing an edition on the critique of poetry (forthcoming with S. Rothbart). Her articles cover topics from Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Hölderlin to Dorothea Schlegel’s poetics to Fridays for Future’s social media coverage of environmental justice. She is frequently teaching courses and seminars on nature writing and on representations and concepts of sustainability in literature and culture from Icelandic Saga to TV-Cli-Fi.