MEINDERT PETERS

I am an independent scholar and Honorary Faculty Research Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.

I specialise in German and European literature and performance in the 20th and 21st centuries as well as theories of embodiment. My research interests include questions of urban migration, dis/ability, sexuality, and gender.

My first book entitled Habituation in German Modernism explores how writers imagined the ways in which we adapt to new and/or unfamiliar environments by bringing German literature and thought of the early twentieth century – a time of massive urban migration and immense social and material change in Europe – into dialogue with current research in the cognitive sciences.

My current research project Dancing Modernist Literature, in part funded by a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, explores 21st-century dance adaptations of modernist literature. From Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Woolf’s Orlando, it asks what these adaptations tell us about the continuing relevance of these modernist texts, imagining anew their concerns around sexuality, disability, aging, and gender through the body. A conversation about my work on The Metamorphosis can be found in this podcast (with Karen Leeder).

I am series editor of Brill’s Bodies & Abilities in Culture, Literature, and the Arts, a book series exploring human physical abilities and their imaginaries in culture, literature, and the arts; and I am co-curator of Kafka: Making of an Icon, a major exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford and the Morgan Library in New York.

I am also an associate researcher on the AHRC-funded Kafka’s Transformative Communities Project (PI: Carolin Duttlinger). As part of this Project, we worked with award-winning choreographer Arthur Pita on a new adaptation of Kafka's ‘A Hunger Artist’ for which I held two grants. A recording of a roundtable in which I discuss ‘A Hunger Artist’ alongside Ankhi Mukherjee, Peter Boxall, and Alys Moody — hosted by Karen Leeder — can be found on the University of Oxford's website.

I am a former professional ballet dancer. I have danced leading roles in such ballets as The Nutcracker, A Streetcar Named Desire, Romeo and Juliet, Le Spectre de la Rose, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

meindert.peters@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk

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JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

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