Honorary Faculty Research Fellow
Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages
University of Oxford
meindert.peters@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
My research explores how the moving body is imagined, represented, and theorised across modernist literature, dance, and critical thought. Bringing literary studies into dialogue with dance studies and phenomenology, I examine how bodily movement shapes aesthetic experience and cultural understandings of embodiment. I am the author of Habituation in German Modernism and am currently completing Dancing Modernist Literature, a study of how contemporary dance renews modernist explorations of non-normative movement.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Dance adaptations of modernist works by authors such as Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf have been thriving in the last twenty years. Why? Modernist literature’s exploration of the mind and its experiments with language seem at odds with the largely non-verbal medium of dance and its emphasis on the body and movement. By turning to this untold history of dance adaptations, this project will generate a new understanding of the reception and continuing relevance of modernist literature in the twenty-first century.
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LATEST PUBLICATIONS
- Provincialising Berlin in Menschen im Hotel
(In German Life and Letters) - No Creature of Habit? Gregor Samsa’s Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita’s Adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
(In Journal of Modern Literature) - Hoffmann at the Ballet
(Forthcoming in E.T.A. Hoffmann in Context)
NEW MEDIA