German and Russian Studies @ the

University of Missouri
451 Strickland Hall | Columbia, MO 65211-4170
email: grs@missouri.edu | phone: 573-882-4328 | fax: 573-884-8456

Faculty | Engelstein

Stefani Engelstein

Stefani Engelstein
Professor Engelstein in front of the Medical History Museum, Berlin

Rocky Mountain National Park

Glacier National Park

Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse
available from SUNY Press

Associate Professor of German
Editor: German Studies Calls-for-Papers List
Education: Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, 2001
B.A. in Literature, Yale University, 1992
Office: 428B Strickland Hall
Phone: 573-882-9450
Email: engelsteins@missouri.edu

Curriculum vita (Word)

I am currently chairing the planning committee for the 5th annual Life Sciences & Society Symposium, Darwin’s On-going Revolution: Evolutionary Thought in Emerging Fields. This interdisciplinary event will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species . The symposium will bring to campus an international roster of speakers at the leading edges of new fields, who will address new directions in evolutionary research, new challenges to traditional disciplinary boundaries, and public perceptions of the expanding role of evolution. Topics addressed will include the relevance of evolution to health, to psychology, and to our own lives; audiences will hear about our earliest human ancestors and about the history of religious engagement with the topic of evolution. Speakers will be: David Sloan Wilson, Gillian Beer, Michael Ruse, Randolph Nesse, Ann Gibbons, Ronald Numbers, and David Geary. The event is free and open to the public. More information is available at http://darwindays.missouri.edu , and registration through this site is requested at to help us with logistical planning.

Research

My research focuses on German and British literature and the life sciences in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. I explore the significance of shifting representations of the body in literature and other disciplines for emerging theories of human subjectivity, gender, volition, ethical behavior, and political organization. I am interested in the development of biological justifications for ideologies of race, gender, and social hierarchies. These issues also inform my work on German-Jewish culture from the Enlightenment to the present.

At the moment I am working on a book called The Universal Family: Heredity, Sibling Incest, and Collective Identity, in which I investigate new understandings of relatedness in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe through an exploration of developing theories of heredity, an emerging understanding of nationality and race as biologically determined, and narratives of sibling incest. Critical theory is all but silent on the sibling relationship, which is however pervasive in other cultural products, and is necessary to understanding both individual and collective identity.

My 2008 book Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY; http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61639) explores debates at the turn of the 19th century surrounding the human form – its reproduction, its maiming through injury and amputation, and its supplementation with prosthetics. These concerns not only dominated natural history, but informed a variety of interrelated discourses such as surgery, art, aesthetics, and literature. Anxious Anatomy traces the transformation of the concept of teleology from a principle in natural history necessary for understanding reproduction, into a rationalization for using the biological sciences to ground ideologies in the body – from theories of subjectivity, race, and gender, to support for republican revolution and social hierarchies. The book provides a timely and compelling cultural history as well as provocative new interpretations of works by Goethe, Blake, Kleist, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and Austen.

I appeared as a guest on the Chicago Public Radio talk show Odyssey on a program about Medicine and the Body (scroll down to June 21, 2004).

I founded and edit the German Studies Calls-for-Papers List which provides a forum for Calls for Papers in all areas related to the field of German Studies as well as on interdisciplinary and comparative topics.

Teaching

Courses I teach include

Graduate Courses

The Enlightenment and Romanticism
German-Jewish Culture through Literature
Enlightenment and Romantic Aesthetics
Sibling Incest in German Literature

Undergraduate Courses

German-Jewish Culture through Literature
Disciplining Bodies: Literature and the Life Sciences
Monstrous Births: Nineteenth-Century Tales of Creation
German Civilization I and II
Eerie Tales
Introduction to German Literature (formerly Advanced German Reading)
Contemporary German Culture

Recent Publications

Books

Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. From SUNY Press. Series: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. 2008.

Violence, Aesthetics, Culture: Germany 1789-1938. Co-editor with Carl Niekerk. Preliminary contract with Rodopi Press. 2009.

Articles

“The Father in Fatherland: Violent Ideology and Corporeal Paternity in Kleist.” Forthcoming in Violence, Aesthetics, Culture: Germany 1789-1938. Ed. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engelstein. Preliminary contract with Rodopi Press. 2009.

The Open Wound of Beauty: Kafka Reading Kleist. The Germanic Review. 81.4. (Fall 2006): 340-359.

Sibling Incest and Cultural Voyeurism in Günderode's Udohla and Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut. The German Quarterly. Forthcoming. 77.3 (July 2004)

Reproductive Machines in E.T.A. Hoffmann. Body Dialectics in the Age of Goethe. Ed. Holger Pausch and Marianne Henn. Rodopi Press. 2003. 169-193.

The Regenerative Geography of the Text in William Blake. Modern Language Studies. 30.2 (Fall 2000): 61-86.

Out on a Limb: Military Medicine, Heinrich von Kleist and the Disarticulated Body. German Studies Review. 23.2 (May 2000): 225-244.
[Winner of the 2001 Article Prize for an Outstanding Article, awarded by the DAAD amd the German Studies Association.]