Dr Joanna Raisbeck
Research
After a year as a Stipendiary Lecturer in German at Wadham and at Queen’s, prior to which I spent a year as a Humboldt research fellow at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, I am now a Stipendiary Lecturer in German at St Hilda’s College. I was also the recipient of a MHRA Research Scholarship in 2020/21. My doctoral thesis was concerned with the Early Romantic poet and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806), and how close attention to her poems, plays, and prose reveals her metaphysical commitments to Spinozist pantheism — the idea that God and the world are the same. One of the primary aims of my thesis was to establish Günderrode a significant intellectual and literary figure alongside the better known Jena circle of Frühromantiker (e.g. Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel). My doctoral thesis was awarded the inaugural Klaus Heyne-Preis zur Erforschung der deutschen Romantik (Klaus Heyne Award for Research in German Romanticism) from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in 2021 and was the joint first-place winner of the Novalis-Preis from the Internationale Novalis-Gesellschaft (International Novalis Society) and the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in 2022. A revised version of the thesis has been published with Legenda and the Modern Humanities Research Association, entitled Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic.
I’m broadly interested in the literature, philosophy, intellectual history, and their intersections with science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am currently developing a research interest in the interaction between literature and science from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, as well as a project on how to write an alternative history of German literature of the Goethezeit, looking at how literature is made by a variety of actors — writers, editors, publishers, and readers.
Teaching
I teach modern literature and translation on the undergraduate course: Papers II, III, and IV on the Prelims course; for FHS, Paper VIII options from the eighteenth century to twentieth century; eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century options for Paper X, as well as Paper II (unseen translation).
Publications
Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic (Cambridge: Legenda, 2022), http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Karoline-von-G%C3%BCnderrode
‘Daimonic Energies in Hölderlin’s Tod des Empedokles’, Forces of Nature. Dynamism and Agency in German Romanticism, Frederike Middelhoff, Adrian Renner (eds.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 127-46.
‘Race and Colonialism around 1800: Herder, Fischer, Kleist’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 91.2 (June 2022), 140-56.
‘Lebenskraft’, Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 1.2 (November 2021), https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/45
‘“Diese Unwissenheit ist mir der unerträglichste Mangel, der gröste Widerspruch”: The Pursuit of Pre-rational Knowledge in Günderrode’, Anti\Idealism: Re-Interpreting a German Discourse, Gert Hofmann, Juliana de Albuquerque (eds.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 131-45.
‘Performativity and “Poetic” Epistemology: Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten’s Response to Moses Mendelssohn’s Aesthetics’, Edinburgh German Yearbook 12: Re-Populating the Eighteenth Century: Second-Tier Writing in the German Enlightenment, Johannes Birgfeld, Michael Wood (eds.) (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018), 213-30.
‘ “Und monarchie ist beßer als anarchie, und Aristokratie, und Kannaillearchie – den daß ists jezt”: Ein neu entdeckter Brief Therese Hubers und Georg Forsters an Georgine Heyne’, Georg-Forster-Studien 21 (2018), 91-104.
(Photo: John Cairns)
