Helmut Muller-Sievers
Professor
German Program

Office: MKNA 211
Office hours: Via Zoom

Statement on Graduate Student Advising

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 and Courtesy Professor of English. 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), Desorientierung: Anatomie und Dichtung bei Georg Büchner (Göttingen: Wallstein 2003), and The Cylinder. Kinematics of the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press 2012) Among his recent articles are: „Getriebelehre. Zur Klassifikation von Maschinen um 1800.“ In: Michael Eggers (ed.), Von Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschieden. Vergleich, Analogie und Klassifikation in Wissenschaft und Literatur. Heidelberg: Winter 2011, 251 – 271; „Fortsetzung. Zur Rolle des Takts bei der Entstehung des Realismus.“ In: Takt und Frequenz. Archiv für Mediengeschichte 2011, 27 - 34; and „Kyklophorology. Hans Blumenberg and the Intellectual History of Technics.“ In: Telos 158 (Spring 2012) (in print). Professor Muller-Sievers is currently working on a volume of essays, and on a larger project on astronomy, music, and machines. 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).