Helmut Muller-Sievers
Professor

Helmut Muller-Sievers (MA in German and Latin Literature, FU Berlin 1985, Ph.D. in German and the Humanities, Stanford 1990) is Professor of German. His work is concerned with the interrelations of literature, science, philosophy, and with the history of philology and interpretation. He is the author of Epigenesis. Naturphilosophie im Sprachdenken Wilhelm von Humboldts (Paderborn: Schoeningh 1994), Self-Generation: Biology, Literature, Philosophy around 1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997), and Desorientierung: Anatomie und Dichtung bei Georg Büchner (Göttingen: Wallstein 2003). Among his recent articles are: “Reading without Interpreting: German Textual Criticism and the Case of Georg Büchner,” Modern Philology 103/4 (May 2006), pp. 498 – 518; “Kultur & Technik. Thomas Pynchons Umschlag,” Tobias Nanz, Bernhard Siegert (eds.), ex machina. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kulturtechniken (Weimar: VDG 2006), pp. 89 – 108; “The Heredity of Poetics,” Staffan Muller-Wille, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds.), Heredity Produced. At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500 – 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2007), pp. 443 – 465; “'Belebte Schraube ohne Ende.' Zur Vorgeschichte der Doppelhelix,” Trajekte 16 (April 2008), pp. 25 – 28.

Professor Muller-Sievers is currently working on two large-scale projects: on a history of 19th century kinematics and its relation to narrative prose, and on an edited volume (with John Hamilton and Sean Gurd) entitled “Radical Philology.”

At Northwestern University, where he taught from 1990 – 2009, Professor Muller-Sievers has been the Lane Professor in the Humanities 1997 – 1998, the Director of the Kaplan Center for the Humanities 1998 – 2002, and the Director of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies 2003 – 2006. He has held fellowships from the National Humanities Center (1994 – 1995), from the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (1997, 1998, 2002 – 2003), from the Institut für Kulturforschung in Vienna (2006), and from the Getty Research Institute (2007 – 2008).