Fabia Weisser

Fabia’s research focuses on Margarete Susman (1872-1966), a German-Jewish philosopher of religion, literary critic, and poet. Her dissertation, “Margarete Susman — Homelessness in History,” examines Susman’s hermeneutics and analyzes how the philosopher uses literary texts as a lens through which she investigates the present, mapping literary narratives onto the profound historical ruptures of the two World Wars and the Shoah. For Susman, genres offer distinct ways of engaging with history, and literary characters serve as archetypes through which individual destinies become collective ones. Fabia aims to address Susman’s neglect in scholarship on German-Jewish intellectual history.

Her project on Margarete Susman also reflects several of her broader scholarly interests, including mysticism, the philosophy of religion, and metaphysics. During her undergraduate and graduate studies, Fabia has researched religious splinter groups from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the Salzburg Protestants and the persecuted Pietist movement known as the “Truly Inspired.”  

Fabia is passionate about teaching and second-language pedagogy. She is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, where she leads pedagogical orientation sessions for new TAs. She is also currently pursuing the McGraw Center’s Teaching Transcript program. Before coming to Princeton, Fabia received the 2023 Graduate Associate Teaching Award at the Ohio State University.

Before coming to Princeton, Fabia studied in Dresden, Munich, Minneapolis, and Columbus. She earned her M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the Ohio State University, where she served as a teaching assistant. From 2018 to 2021, she worked as a student research assistant in the Departments of Early Modern History at the Technical University of Dresden and Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. Her work has appeared in the University of Minnesota’s Central Europe Yearbook. She presented at graduate conferences in German Studies at Ohio State and Princeton, as well as at the Colloquium for Medieval and Early Modern German Studies at Stanford University. At Princeton, her research has been supported by the Program in Medieval Studies, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Institute for International and Regional Studies.