Ulrike Wagner

Ulrike Wagner received her Ph.D. in German and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2012. She holds an M.A. degree in North American Studies and German literature from the Free University of Berlin (2005) and was a visiting Fulbright scholar in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Between 2009 and 2012 she was a member of the bi-national PhD-Net “Das Wissen der Literatur” at the Humboldt University and an associated member of the university’s collaborative research center “Transformationen der Antike.” Her research and teaching have been awarded with a Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Berlin State Library, an Elsa-Neumann Dissertation Fellowship, and a Trinity College Graduate Fellowship. At Bard College Berlin she is the director of the German Studies Program, has taught in the “Language and Thinking” program and developed courses on European and American Romanticism, Germany’s Jewish Enlightenment, literature and culture of the Weimar period in Berlin, the history of German literature through the lens of human-animal relationships, feminism and community, and current debates in the German public sphere.

Research
The history and practices of philology; relations between German Romanticism and American Transcendentalism in the context of religious debates, historicism, classicism, aesthetics, and the rise of the liberal arts model of education; German-Jewish women writers; feminist theory and practice.

Courses offered at Bard College Berlin
Comparative Perspectives on the Romantic Revolution
Poetry and Poetics
Enlightenment Media and the Rise of Berlin's Haskalah
Menschen-Tiere and Tier-Menschen: Creaturely Perspectives in German Literature and Culture (in German)
Goldene Zwanziger/Roaring Twenties: Art and Culture in Weimar Berlin (in German)
Jewish Berlin from the Enlightenment to the Present (in German)
The German Public Sphere (in German)
Social Change and the German Public Sphere (in German) 
Feminism and Community (OSUN Network Course, co-taught with Laura Scuriatti)
German for Reading Knowledge
German Conversation
German A1 – C2
Academic Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Selected Publications

Book Manuscript (in progress)
Transcendental Philology: Emerson, Fuller, Nietzsche, and the Migrations of a Method

Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“Fanny Lewald (1811 – 1889).” The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition, eds. Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar, 151-174 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). [link]

“Nineteenth-Century American Translations of German Philology.” Germanic Philology: Perspectives in Linguistics and Literature, eds. Tina Boyer and Heiko Wiggers, 177-201 (Delaware: Vernon Press, 2024). [link]

“Baukunst und Satzbaukunst als Wissens- und Lebensdisziplin: Herder und Goethe im Dialog.” “Kunst kommt von Können oder von Kennen her:” Künste und Ästhetik bei Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Stefan Greif, 93 – 105 (Heidelberg: Synchron Publishers, 2024). [link]

“Religious Experience, Storytelling, and Ethical Action in Muhammad Iqbal's Javid Nama and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan,” co-authored with Maria Khan. Literature and Theology 36.4 (2022): 407-430. [link]

“On Dialogical Writing, Self-forming, and Salon Culture: Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Fanny Lewald.” Special Issue on “Women Philosophers in Hegel’s Time.” Hegel Bulletin 43.3 (2022): 438-466. [link]

“Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Re-enactment: Revisiting Cavell’s Emerson.” Over and Over and Over Again. Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, eds. Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, 113-120, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022). [pdf]

“Schleiermacher’s Geselligkeit, Henriette Herz, and the ‘Convivial Turn.’” Conviviality at the Crossroads: Poetics and Politics of Everyday Encounters, eds. Oscar Hemer, Maja Povrzanović Frykman, and Per-Markku Ristilammi, 65-87 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). [pdf]

“Utopias of Purposelessness: Sacred and Secular Sociability around 1800.” Groups, Coteries, Circles and Guilds: Modernist Aesthetics and the Utopian Lure of Community, ed. Laura Scuriatti, 17-40 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019). [link]

“Herder und die Philologie. Fünf Thesen zu einer produktiven Beziehung. Am Beispiel des Volksliedprojekts,” co-authored with Kaspar Renner. Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook 13 (2016):13-41. [link]

“Origin as Fiction and Contest: Herder’s Reinvention of Religious Experience in Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie.” Herder and Religion. Contributions from the 2010 Conference of the International Herder Society at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, ed. Staffan Bengtsson et al., 57-71 (Heidelberg: Synchron Publishers, 2016). [link]

“Transcendentalism and the Power of Philology: Herder, Schleiermacher, and the Transformation of Biblical Scholarship in New England.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 57.3 (2012): 419-445. [pdf]

“Herders Anthropologie und die Funktion einer Sprache der Liebe und Freundschaft.” Liebe als Metapher. Übertragungskonzepte eines interpersonalen Verhältnisses, eds. Walter Delabar and Helga Meise, 121-150 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012). [link]

“Der Mensch siehet nur, wie ein Mensch siehet: Modern Functions of Ancient Greek Literature in Light of Herder’s Anthropological Thinking.” Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook 11 (2012): 107-129. [link]

“From Words to Worlds: De l’Allemagne and the Transnational Recasting of the Ancient Past.” Germaine de Staël: Forging a Politics of Mediation, ed. Karyna Szmurlo, 247-262 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011). [link]

“The Aesthetics of bildende Nachahmung: A Transatlantic Dialogue between Karl Philipp Moritz and Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Yearbook of German-American Studies 45 (2010): 33-59. [pdf]

Edited Volume
Herder and Religion. Contributions from the 2010 Conference of the International Herder Society at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, eds. Staffan Bengtsson, Heinrich Clairmont, Robert E. Norton, Johannes Schmidt, and Ulrike Wagner (Heidelberg: Synchron Publishers, 2016). [link]

Contact
Dr. Ulrike Wagner
Director, German Studies Program
Phone: +49 30 43733 209
Email: u.wagner[at]berlin.bard.edu