Florian Fuchs

Florian Fuchs joins the Department of German as a permanent Research Scholar and regular Lecturer (every fall semester) in the Spring of 2024. His primary fields of research are German and comparative literature, media studies, art history, and the history of ideas. He works on material from the 16th to the 21st century.

Florian received his PhD with distinction from the German Department at Yale University in 2017 after studying Comparative Literature at Stanford University, Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure Paris, and Kulturwissenschaften at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder. After finishing his PhD, he taught at Yale, Princeton, and the Freie Universität Berlin, where he was a member of the Peter-Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature and a Research Postdoc in the DFG-funded EXC research cluster “Temporal Communities.”

Florian spent the year 2013-2014 as a Mellon Fellow in the Technologies of Knowledge-program for the integrated humanities at Yale. In 2021, he was a Junior Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center and in 2022 an International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. Since Fall 2023 he is a corresponding member at the ECHO Center for the Study of Rhetoric Between Old and New Media at FU Berlin.

Florian is the author of Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature (Zone Books, 2023), which studies short form narratives since the 1700s to develop a practice theory of literature. He is the co-editor (and co-translator) of History, Metaphors, Fable: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (Cornell University Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Below Genre: Short Forms and their Affordances (Special Issue Colloquia Germanica, 2023).

In his current book project, he is writing an Archaeology of the Personal Device 1400-1900, which investigates the device-based formation of Western personhood from a set of legal, medial, and self-fashioning practices.

He is also working on a project titled Theory Films: The Visual Afterlife of Theoretical Discursivity. In it, he traces the use of moving images and videography as a theoretical medium, reflecting a shift since the 1960s from textual culture to visual culture in film works by Laura Mulvey, Hellmuth Costard, Trinh Minh-ha, Harun Farocki, and others.

Florian has published widely in journals such as New Literary History, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, New German Critique, Los Angeles Review of Books, Athenäum: Jahrbuch der Friedrich Schlegel-Gesellschaft, Colloquia Germanica, cargo: Zeitschrift für Film, Medien, Kultur, as well as in numerous collected volumes and anthologies.