I am a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Junior Research Fellow at New College, both at Oxford.
My work straddles the Medical and Environmental Humanities by exploring the dynamics between human physical abilities (habit and skill) and the ecologies that we familiarize and shape. My interdisciplinary work draws on German and European modernist literature, philosophy, and dance, and is in dialogue with wider questions of embodied cognition in the cognitive sciences.
My first book (Camden House, 2024) entitled Habituation in German Modernism explores the ways in which our bodies adapt to unfamiliar and new environments.
From October 2022, my research is funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. This project explores 21st-century dance adaptations of modernist literature and what these adaptations tell us about the continuing relevance of these modernist texts, in particular about how questions of sexuality, disability, and gender are negotiated between bodies and human ecologies.
I am a former professional ballet dancer.
meindert.peters@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
MONOGRAPH
- Habituation in German Modernism: Embodied Cognition in Literature and Thought
(Forthcoming with Camden House)
JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
- Manuscript Journeys
(With Katrin Kohl; forthcoming in The Kafka Exhibition Catalogue) - Benjamin and i10
(Forthcoming in Monatshefte) - Kafka as Literature of the Absurd
(Forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature) - Introduction: Transatlantic Cognitive Cultures.
(With Shannon McBriar; in Symbiosis) - 'One Must Know How to Dance': Vicki Baum's Menschen im Hotel (1929), Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932), and a Choreography of Social Responses.
(In Symbiosis) - Revaluations Through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future.
(In Dance Research) - Heidegger's Embodied Others: On Critiques of the Body and 'Intersubjectivity' in Being and Time.
(In Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) - 'Trekt Heuvelman voor ons gezicht?': The Library of Writing-Master Johannes Heuvelman.
(In Quaerendo)
OTHER ARTICLES (SELECTED)
- Monthly Column 'Kafka in Oxford' (In Dutch)
(In Bazarow Magazine) - Book Review of Kata Gellen's Kafka and Noise
(In Seminar) - Between Box and Body: On a Dance Improvisation with Machteld Rullens's Cardboard Box Sculptures
(In ASAP/J) - The Swan / No More Dying
(In The Oxonian Review) - Movement Literacy
(With Patty Argyrides; in Modernism/modernity Print+) - Article Review of Sonja Boos' 'Reading Gestures'
(In The Journal of Literature and Science) - Interiors of (Un)Use
(In The Modernist Review) - A Love Story Nevertheless
(In The Oxonian Review) - Three Vertiginous Thrills and a Dud
(In The Oxonian Review) - The Fantasy that is Masurca Fogo
(In The Oxonian Review)
CREATIVE WORK (SELECTED)
- Mate (Choreography, premiere: 9 June 2011, TanzArt OstWest Festival, Gießen, Germany)
'Smashingly funny ... delightful, a highlight' ('Umwerfend komisch ... köstlich, ein Höhepunkt', Heiner Schultz, 11 June 2011, Gießener Anzeiger)