WCGS Research Group ‘Environment Studies’ – Bio Members

Alice Alice A. Kuzniar (U of Waterloo) is working on a book on "German Kuzniar as the Vital Life Force of Homeopathy." The Romantic poets, among whom the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann is to be counted, remind us of our embeddedness in nature. Homeopathy lives on today as most important legacy of the Romantic tradition of a harmonic symbiosis with nature. Although homeopathy has enjoyed a vibrant afterlife up to our present day, its intellectual, indeed, poetic groundings have been largely forgotten or even ignored. To understand Hahnemann via Romantic tenets astir at his time means to underscore the importance of the literary field in this momentous chapter to the history of science and medicine. Alice Kuzniar has presented invited guest lectures on this subject at the University of Pittsburgh, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of Toronto, and York University’s Science and Technology Studies Workshop. Her first article on this subject appeared as “Similia similibus curentur: Homeopathy and its Magic Wand of Analogy.” Literary Studies and the Question of Reading . Ed. Eric Downing, Jonathan Hess, and Richard Benson. Rochester: Camden House, 2012. In addition, Alice Kuzniar has recently published on the human-dog bond in Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (University of Chicago Press, 2006). She has also written on how contemporary art and film that relate to animal welfare and the food industry in two pieces: “Where is the Animal after Posthumanism? Quivering Life in Sue Coe’s Art,” Special Issue edited by David Clark of The New Centennial Review on “The Animal . . . in Theory” 21.2 (2011) and “Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Unser täglich Brot: Preservation, the Food Industry, and the Interrogation of Visual Evidence.” Forthcoming in The Past on Display: Museums, Film, Musealization . Ed. Gabriele Mueller and Peter McIsaac. She also organized and chaired the special “Women in German” session at the 2012 MLA Convention on “Women for Ecological Justice.”

Nina Nina Amstutz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art at the University of Amstutz Toronto. Her research investigates intersections of art and science from the 18 th to the early 20 th centuries, with a particular focus on how natural history shaped constructions of nature and the environment in the visual arts. Her dissertation, “ and the Science of Landscape,” takes recent interrogations of the nature/culture dichotomy in ecological writing as a point of departure to reconsider the representation of nature in Romantic landscape painting. She challenges the accepted religious and political interpretations of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes by demonstrating how methods and principles underlying the biological sciences informed his configurations of nature and the body. Her research offers a provocative rethinking of the boundaries between landscape and figurative representation in the 19 th -century context. As a member of the research group on the environment, she has presented a paper on how analogies between animal and vegetable organisms in Romantic science inflect the dynamic between nature and the human form in Friedrich’s anthropomorphic landscapes.

Angela Angela Borchert is associate professor of German and Comparative Literature in Borchert the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Western University, in London, Ontario. Her scholarly activities concentrate on everyday cultural and poetic practices primarily in Weimar from 1750 to 1830 with publications on the Weimar fashion journal, Das Journal des Luxus und der Moden , fashion history, dance and particularly on occasional poetry. Her interest in the environment concerns both concrete spaces and the poetogenetic potential of the environment. She shows how landscape gardens serve as sociable spaces for the transformations of occasional poetry in her book Poetische Praxis: Gelegenheitsdichtung und Geselligkeitsdichtung an Herzogin Anna Amalias Hof in Weimar, Ettersburg und Tiefurt. In the WCGS research group, she presented a work in progress on arabesque wall decoration and its poetic transformation with . The ensuing article will be published in Tapezierte Interieur-Anordnungen. Narrative des Wohnsubjekts um 1800. She is currently integrating eco-critical research into teaching with a new undergraduate course tentatively entitled “Nature and the Environment in , Thought and Culture.”

Allison G. Allison Cattell is a Ph.D. candidate in German in the Department of Germanic Cattell and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo. Her MA thesis explored a postmethod conceptualization of Communicative Language Teaching using concepts from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen . Her dissertation project investigates the ways in which German literary texts written between the two World Wars negotiate concurrent scientific-medical discourses on the disabled body and present alternative ways of creating knowledge about and valuing the body. Her involvement in the WCGS research group on the Environment stems from a desire to expand her knowledge of how and literature can contribute to our understanding of humanity's relationship to the natural world. She has presented and discussed work in progress at group meetings, and the feedback she received from other members helped her to polish a conference paper she then presented in April 2011, entitled: “Dogged research on aping the human: The discourse of species in Kafka’s Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (1917) and Forschungen eines Hundes (1922)”.

Anna Anna Ezekiel has recently completed her PhD in philosophy at McGill Ezekiel University. Her area of specialization is post-Kantian German philosophy and she is currently working on the human-nature relationship and politics in the poetry and dramas of the early German romantic Karoline von Günderrode. She has presented at the WCGS environment research group on the implications for agency of Günderrode's images of human vulnerability and finitude. Website: www.annaezekiel.com.

Tanya Tanya Hagmann is a first-year MA student in the dual MA programme and plans Hagmann to write her MA thesis on ecological thought in contemporary German literature.

Christine In her research, Christine Lehleiter focuses on the intersection between literature Lehleiter and the life sciences. She is in the process of completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled "Land, Money, and Blood: the History of Heredity in Romanticism," which examines biological, legal, and literary discourses on heredity from 1770-1830 and their impact on the concept of modern subjectivity. In a second project, "Original Sin: the Quest for the Origin of Evil" (funded by SSHRC) she studies the idea of original sin and its reinterpretation in the context of new assumptions in anthropology around 1800. At the moment, she is in the process of preparing a collection of on "Fact and Fiction: Literature and Science in the German and European Context," which is under advanced contract with the University of Toronto Press. (For the symposium which was held in the context of this project please see see: http://german.utoronto.ca/downloads/FactandFictionPoster2011Updated.pdf) Recently, she has started to consider eco-critical approaches for her research.

Paola Paola Mayer is an associate professor of European Studies and German in the Mayer School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph. She has published on German Romantic literature and thought, myth and fairy tales in 18 th- and 19 th -century German culture, and the uncanny and fantastic in German literature and theory. She has published a monograph, Romanticism and its Appropriation of Jacob Böhme: Theosophy - Hagiography - Literature. (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1999); and is currently working on another on the uncanny in Romantic aesthetics and literature. Both intersect with the interests of the Research Group in that they deal with aspects of how the Romantics conceived the relationship of nature to the world of spirit, and of the human individual to nature. Romantic criticism of contemporary natural science, with its instrumenta- lization of nature and of other humans, also plays a major role in the study of the uncanny. She presented a paper at the Romantic Ecology Symposium organized in connection with the research group, held at the University of Waterloo on March 11, 2011. The paper was entitled, “’s ‘Der Königssohn’ – an Anti-poetic Tale of the Golden Age?” and dealt with the golden age myth (defined by harmony between humans and nature), viewed from a woman author’s perspective, and differing from male-authored versions of the myth in that nature is given the active role in the restoral of harmony. The tale is also remarkable in that it contains a pladoyer for the rights of animals. Together with a colleague, Dr. Ruediger Mueller, Paola Mayer is also preparing an anthology of tales by Alexander Moritz Frey (1888-1956). One section will be devoted to tales that criticize the mistreatment of animals, and/or present beings who blur the distinction between human and animal.

Belinda Belinda Kleinhans’ connection to the environmental humanities is mainly Kleinhans founded in a commitment to Cultural and Literary Animal Studies as well as a focus on the relationship between language and nature in general. Her current research project analyses the representation of animals in German literature after 1945, seeking a deeper understanding of the connection between language, representation, and power. In this context, she has published an article in Orbis Litterarum 66.5 (2011) entitled Jenseits der Grenze zwischen Mensch und Tier. Becoming in Günter Eichs Hörspiel Sabeth . Reading postwar texts by Ilse Aichinger, Günter Eich, and Wolfdietrich Schnurre as part of a crisis of language and representation and an acknowledged failure of certain humanist principles, she analyzes how postwar German writers negotiate anthropocentric and speciesist discourses via animal figures, drawing on such posthumanist thinkers as Derrida, Agamben, and Deleuze & Guattari. By focusing on the posthumanist critique which is articulated through the animal in the literary texts, she develops a concept of an animal poetology in her dissertation. In this context, she has presented in the environmental study group within the last two years on traces of becoming-animal in Günter Eich’s radio drama “Sabeth”, and more recently on the discovery of the animal as subversive language and text in Ilse Aichinger’s short prose. She also presented at the Romantic Ecology Symposium at the University of Waterloo (ON), on March 19, 2011, which was organized by the WCGS Environmental Study Group, on “Romantic Environment and the Animal in Günter Eich's poetry cycles Abgelegene Gehöfte (1948) and Botschaften des Regens (1955)“.

John H. Professor Smith came to the University of Waterloo in January 2012 as the Rt. Smith Hon. John G. Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies. He has presented to the environmental working group on the influence of Spinoza and Leibniz on German Romantic vitalism. This topic is part of his most recent book project, in which he explores the significance of infinitesimal calculus in German thought (from Leibniz, through Idealism and Romanticism, to Neo- Kantianism and German-Jewish theologies after WWI).

Andrea Andrea Speltz recently received her doctorate from Queens University, writing Speltz on the influence of Rousseau on Wieland. For the last two years she has taught at Guelph University. She spoke to the environmental working group on conceptions of nature in Rousseau.

Jean Jean Wilson is Director of the unique, interdisciplinary Arts & Science Program Wilson at McMaster University, and approaches the work of the WCSG research group on the environment with the wide-ranging interests and concerns of her Arts & Science students and colleagues very much in mind. An award-winning teacher of courses in Comparative Literature, she is involved in a number of cross- disciplinary initiatives in undergraduate education. A member of the Department of Linguistics & Languages in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster, she also contributes to McMaster’s graduate program in Gender Studies & Feminist Research, and has served as Director of Comparative Literature and as Associate Director of Peace Studies. She is co-editor of “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991 (vol. 18 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press, 2006), and has enjoyed working with fellow WCGS research group member Paola Mayer (and Hartwig Mayer) as co-editor of Romanticism, Humanism, Judaism: The Legacy of Hans Eichner (Lang, forthcoming). Like many of the members of the working group on the environment, she works on the Age of Goethe: in particular, on Kleist.

Updated: February 7 th 2013