Research and Teaching Interests
German literature, culture, and intellectual history from the 17th century to the present; poetry and theory of poetry and literature; literary criticism and the cultural public sphere; Environmental Humanities and Nature Writing; Gender Studies; memoir and cultural memory
BA (U of Hamburg, Germany), MA (Johns Hopkins U), PhD (Princeton U)
Associate Faculty of the Sustainability Institute (2020-present)
Steering Committee Member of The Umwelt Center for Germanic Studies and Environmental Humanities (2023-present)
Research and Publications
May Mergenthaler is currently writing a book on the functions, concepts, and figures of light in German poetry from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. She argues that light plays crucial roles in the emergence of the modern lyric. In the wake of secularization and the loss of a secure place in a religious cosmos, poetic formulations of light that merge and transform various cultural, scientific, and religious discourses become a means of understanding human beings as part of a natural world. May Mergenthaler 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.
Her first book, Zwischen Eros und Mitteilung: Die Frühromantik im Symposion der “Athenaeums-Fragmente” (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 2012), explores the project of Early Romanticism as a collaborative––and self-contradictory––writing endeavor between male and female members of Jena Romantic circle, modeled on and critically adapting Plato’s Symposium.
In the realm of Environmental Humanities, Mergenthaler has published an essay exploring the foundational legitimizing function of science as it appears in the various digital and live expressions and actions of the Fridays for Future movement (2021, co-authored with K. Burnett); a handbook article on the cultural imagination of desert vegetation in colonial and postcolonial settings is forthcoming (2025).
May Mergenthaler is also investigating in how the literary and cultural public sphere, in particular literary critics, shape how readers perceive literary texts, and what texts even gain the attention of the public. With respect to these questions, she has co-edited a volume on Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere (Oxford et al.: Lang, 2015, with B. Fischer) that explores past and current tensions between the perceived need for a public sphere and rational discourse as a means of creating consensus in society and controlling state governments, as conceived by Jürgen Habermas, on the one hand, and people’s particular identities, cultures, or belief systems, on the other. Mergenthaler has also published articles on the controversial concept of a dominant national culture in journals of the Goethezeit (2020), and on the poetic standards that literary critics apply in their reviews of renowned poet Friederike Mayröcker (2020). Currently, she is co-editing a forthcoming volume on the modes of reviewing poetry (2025). A co-edited special issue (2024, with D. Schäfer) explores the role of manuscripts in the production and circulation of literary and non-literary texts.
Her future projects include a history of the critique of poetry from the 17th century to the present—a topic on which she is currently preparing a handbook article, and a biography of the national-conservative German-Jewish Magnus family from Königsberg, today’s Kaliningrad, in the 19th and 20th centuries that traces their paths from Eastern Prussia to Japan, Spain, and Western Germany, and describes and analyzes their varied and shifting cultural alignments and political convictions, in the face of WWI, WWII, fascist regimes, displacement, and the Holocaust, that include Christian national conservativism, fascism/Nazism, anarchism, and emergent democratic ideals.
Teaching & Advising
May Mergenthaler teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses on German literature, culture, intellectual history, and language. Recent and upcoming courses include “German Nature Writing,” “Introduction to Literary Theory,” “Literary Criticism,” and “From Vikings to Orcas: Nature in Germanic and Scandinavian Literatures.”
She has advised dissertations on 18th century literature and literary theory as well as BA theses on topics ranging from ‘Nietzsche and Klimt’ to the translation of women’s poetry and peasants’ literature. In addition, she is regularly serving on BA, MA, and PhD committees, and teaching independent studies on variety of topics including ‘women committing infanticide in 18th-century German drama’ or the history of literary and cultural theory, from the 18th century to the present.