Dennis Schäfer

Dennis Schäfer is a fifth year Ph.D. student. Dennis has a general interest in the study of the 18th and 19th century and is particularly interested in Media Studies and Book History, European Romanticisms, Goethe’s Faust, Western Marxism, the life and works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and memory culture in Central Europe.

He studied German and English literature at the University of Cologne and earned an M.A. from The Ohio State University. Before coming to Princeton, he was a research assistant at the Technical University of Dresden. He has been a visiting student at the University of Warwick and a visiting scholar at the DFG Graduiertenkolleg “Modell Romantik” at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. In Fall 2023, he will be a Werner Keller Fellow of the Goethe Gesellschaft in Weimar.

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 how various ulterior scenes of copying in the time around 1800 illustrate the way authors have written their texts with the help of others.

Dennis’s work has appeared, among others, in the E.T.A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch, Expressionismus, and the Zeitschrift für Germanistik.

Recent Publication

“Neue Digitalisate aus Princeton: Die Benno Elkan Collection of Goethe.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 33.2 (2023), 417-432.