Keywords: Landscape - Environmental Media - Anthropocenic Aesthetics
Affiliation: Princeton University
Xiaoyao Guo is a PhD candidate in the German Department at Princeton University, with a research focus on ecocriticism and media theory. His dissertation, titled “Contested Assemblage: Remapping the Genealogy of Modern Landscape,” assembles an alternative genealogy of the modern landscape to propose a more relevant understanding of the concept for the current age of ecological exigency. Specifically, the project explores various modes of entanglement between human and nature within different historical topoi as represented in literature, visual art, and intellectual history in the German and European tradition. For the academic year 2024-25, he was a DAAD Doctoral Research Fellow at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the co-organizer of the Interdisciplinary Humanities (IHUM) reading group “Representing Ecology, Ecologizing Representation.”
Xiaoyao holds Masters degrees in German and Art History from the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and takes a broad interest in literary, artistic, and cultural modernisms in the European context. He has forthcoming publications on Rainer Maria Rilke's Duineser Elegien and the contemporary representations of the Arctic.