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I teach in the departments of Germanic Studies and of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, and I direct the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities.
My intellectual interests and the courses I teach focus on aesthetic theory, literature and philosophy, and ways of speaking about intensive encounters with art, usually around texts from the European tradition beginning in the eighteenth century. Here is my CV.
Events:
2025:
March 11-13 in Berlin: Workshop "Philologie als Provokation," Part 2.
April 17 in Bloomington: In conversation with Jonathan Elmer and Andrew H. Miller on writing criticism.
May 24 in Bern, Switzerland: talk at the University of Bern.
2024:
Feb. 22 in Los Angeles: Maggie Nelson's graduate seminar on "Theory and Criticism" at USC.
March 12-13 in Berlin: Workshop "Philologie als Provokation" at Freie Universität.
March 29 in Bloomington: co-convener of a conference on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
April 11 - 13 in Charlottesville: Conference on "understanding" convened by Emily Ogden and Nicholas Gaskill.
April 17 in Chicago: Seminary Co-op Bookstore, with Sianne Ngai, to discuss Something Speaks to Me.
April 26 in New York: Institute for the Humanities, with Merve Emre, to discuss Something Speaks to Me.
April 29 in New Haven: Yale German Department, with Merve Emre, to discuss Something Speaks to Me.
April 30 in New York: NYU Humanities Center, with Emily Apter, to discuss Something Speaks to Me.
July 8 in Berlin: Freie Universität, with Christoph König, to discuss criticism and creativity.
October 14 on Zoom: Conversation about Maggie Nelson's new book of essays, Like Love, with her and others.
Recent and recentish work:
"Failing and Falling," On Failing, edited by Amit Chaudhuri (Chennai: Westland Books, 2025), 98 - 110.
“It Begins Around the Eyes (‘In the Penal Colony’),” New Literary History 55 (2024): 355 – 368.
"The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Criticism," MLN 139; 3 (2024): 553 – 566.
Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Excerpt at Google Books. To get a 30% discount when ordering from Chicago’s website, use the code UCPNEW.
Reviews: Yale Review; Genre; Dagens Nyheter; Review 31; The Point Magazine; Los Angeles Review of Books; TLS; Critical Inquiry.
Interview: Liberties."An Immeasurable Field. On Kant's 300th Birthday," The Point Magazine, April 24, 2024.
Stichwörter für die kritische Praxis (Diaphanes, 2023), a volume edited with my colleagues at the Philological Laboratory at FU Berlin.
Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature (De Gruyter, 2021), edited with Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener (open access).
"A Book That Changed My Mind," a series of conversations with thinkers and scholars, most on video.
Thinking With Kant's Critique of Judgment (Harvard UP, 2017).
How to pronounce my name: mee-SHELL shah-OO-lee
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