MEINDERT PETERS

I am Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Junior Research Fellow at New College, both at 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. A more personal reflection on the book can be found in this blogpost.

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 – from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Woolf’s Orlando – 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. 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

MONOGRAPHS

JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

OTHER ARTICLES (SELECTED)

CREATIVE WORK (SELECTED)