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 bridges the Medical and Environmental Humanities by exploring the dynamics between human physical abilities (habit and skill) and the ecologies that they familiarize and shape. My interdisciplinary research 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 how early-twentieth-century writers imaged the ways in which we adapt to new and/or unfamiliar environments.
My current research project Dancing Modernist Literature 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, imagining anew their concerns around sexuality, disability, aging, and gender through the body.
I am series editor of Brill's Bodies & Abilities in Culture, Literature, and the Arts and co-curator of Kafka: Making of an Icon, a major exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford and the Morgan Library in New York.
As a former professional ballet dancer, I have danced leading roles in such literary adaptations as The Nutcracker, A Streetcar Named Desire, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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 Kafka: Making of an Icon) - Kafka as Literature of the Absurd
(Forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature) - Benjamin in i10: Journalistic Networks, Exchange, and Reception behind a Dutch, Multi-Lingual, Avant-Garde Magazine
(In Monatshefte) - 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)
- Timely/Untimely (Book Review of Stanley Corngold's Expeditions to Kafka)
(In Review 31) - Only Fools and Horses
(In The Oxford Kafka Research Centre Blog) - Monthly Column 'Kafka in Oxford' (In Dutch)
(On Bazarow.com) - 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)