Dr. Ulrike Wagner gives a series of talks on Nietzsche and Emerson at Bard College, Columbia University, and Harvard University 

This fall, while serving as a residential fellow at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, Dr. Ulrike Wagner, Director of the Bard College Berlin German Studies department, will give a series of talks on Nietzsche, Emerson, Fuller and their contemporaries across the northeastern United States.

The first of these talks, “Force and Form in Public Criticism: Nietzsche, Fuller, Emerson” took place on October 1, 2026 at Columbia University’s English Department. This talk examined the nineteenth-century exchange between institutionalized German Wissenschaft and American intellectual life as the modern humanities took professional form. Bringing together Margaret Fuller’s conversations, reviews, and journalism; Emerson’s engagement with theological criticism; and Nietzsche’s Emerson-inflected philology, she argues that their public-facing criticism was not peripheral to professionalized scholarship but continuous with, and formative of, its development.

At the Philosophy Salon at Bard College Annandale on October 9, Wagner will give a talk titled “Ordinary Made Extraordinary: Nietzsche’s Pedagogy of Non-Identity.” In this talk, Wagner argues that Nietzsche’s lifelong engagement with Emerson recasts criticism as a pedagogy of non-identity: a practice of learning to see differently. Tracing this Emerson–Nietzsche connection, the talk illuminates Emerson’s formative role in Nietzsche’s philology and offers a new account of transatlantic intellectual history.

Finally, Wagner will join poet Kristen Case and New York Times editor Peter Catapano for a panel on "Where Do New Ideas Come From? A Conversation on Transcendentalism & Contemporary Life” on October 13. The talk takes place within the context of a new collaborative series of public conversations organized by the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), the Concord Free Public Library, and the Thoreau Alliance in Concord, Massachusetts, which will bring CSWR Transcendentalism scholars into conversation with writers, scholars, artists, and broader audiences, exploring questions that connect Transcendentalist thought and practice with contemporary intellectual, cultural, and public life.

Post Date: 10-02-2026