Dennis Schäfer

Dennis Schäfer has been a Ph.D. student in Princeton’s German Department since 2019. Dennis has a general interest in the study of media cultures and particularly focuses on the 18th and 19thcentury, with ancillary interests in film studies, book history, European Romanticisms, Western Marxism, and memory culture in Central Europe. 

In his dissertation, Dennis explores manuscript cultures in the age of books and proposes a genealogy of the amanuensis in the Age of Goethe. His dissertation examines the role of the amanuensis in the writing cabinets of authors like Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Bettina von Arnim. 

In 2024/2025, Dennis was a Dissertation Writing Fellow with the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). Furthermore, Dennis has received research fellowships from the Goethe Gesellschaft Weimar, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Dennis is an avid book collector and a member of the Grolier Club.

His scholarship has appeared, among others, in the E.T.A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch, Expressionismus,the Goethe Jahrbuch, the Zeitschrift für Germanistik and he has reviewed books for theGermanic Review, the Goethe Yearbook and Oxford German Studies. His most recent article – “’[I]m beherrschenden Mittelpunkte einer bestimmt umgrenzten dichterischen und künstlerischen Welt‘: Zum literarischen Familienarchiv der Arnims“ – has just been accepted by the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.

Recent Publications

“Her Own Hand: Female Agency around 1800”, co-edited with Helga Müllneritsch, Publications of the English Goethe Society 93.3 (2024).

“Manuskriptkulturen im Buchzeitalter“, co-edited with May Mergenthaler, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 48.2 (2024).