Dorothea von Mücke

Born in Germany, academically socialized in the US, Dorothea von Mücke is a teacher and scholar at Columbia University, where she is the Gebhard Professor of German Language and Literature. She is interested in the intersections of literature with philosophy and the visual arts, especially as it concerns the accessibility and "shelf life" of those forms of discourse and world making. She co-edited Harvard’s 2004 New History of German Literature and among her books are The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (2003) and The Practices of the Enlightenment. Aesthetics, Authorship and the Public (2015).

During the Fellowship, von Mücke will complete her study, Altars and Art: The Stakes of Literature. Altars have been part of religious rituals in many cultures. However, especially during the long nineteenth-century, altars can also take on a perfectly secular function.