I am Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Underwood International College, the international liberal arts college of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Previously, I was the Taylor Postdoctoral Associate in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, an interdisciplinary position based in the Department of German Studies, after having received my doctorate in the Department of German at Princeton University and my undergraduate degree in German and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. I have additional training in Germany as a Visiting Postdoctoral Associate at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and as a DAAD scholar at the Humboldt Universität, among other positions. I have also been a visiting fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies at the School of Advanced Study at the University College London.
My teaching and research specializations are situated at the intersection of 17th-21th century German literary, intellectual, and cultural history, classical reception studies, media studies, history of the humanities, colonial philology, and gender and sexuality studies. A guiding concern of my work is to develop innovative, critical methodologies to study the sensory and embodied dimensions of German literature, culture, and media, particularly that of sound. Throughout my work, I aim to foreground how concepts and practices of aurally mediated ‘difference,’ ‘diversity’ and ‘alterity’ can and must be productively deployed within readings of the German literary and philosophical canon.
I have published and have articles forthcoming in journals such as Comparative Literature, Classical Receptions Journal, Germanic Review, German Studies Review, Goethe Yearbook, History of European Ideas, and Revue germanique internationale. I have co-edited a special issue on “Canonical Pressures: German Literature and the Voices of Difference” for Germanic Review, and am currently co-editing a special issue on “Sensing Migrant Romanticism” for Comparative Literature, slated to be published in 2025. I have published articles on aural philology, the gendered reception of Sanskrit in nineteenth-century Germany, the media-archaeology of listening and its ethnographic ear in colonial modernity, the cultural acoustics of migrant voices in the archives of the British Library and BBC’s “The Listening Project.” More information about my research is available under “Publications” with links to the abstracts and articles.
The concepts and practices that emerged from my research on the cultural acoustics of difference have allowed me to collaborate with scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences, such as a Mellon-funded research group I organized at Cornell. My research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the DAAD, the Hyde Fellowship at Princeton, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Yonsei University’s Future Leading Fund, and the Goethe Society of North America. I have additionally been offered fellowships by the Volkswagen Stiftung and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
Email address: Tsolanki@yonsei.ac.kr