Marie-Louise James

Marie-Louise James joined the German Department in Fall 2021. She is also a Graduate Affiliate of Princeton’s Program in European Cultural Studies. Her dissertation situates the history of the term “nostalgia” at the threshold of aesthetics and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Of particular interest in this context are writings of the Frankfurt School, discussions of memory and mass culture, as well as intersections between psychoanalysis, art, and literature.  

Marie-Louise approaches her research from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. She has worked on German representations of Italy in the works of Thomas Mann and the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden (The Publications of the English Goethe Society) and published on Aby Warburg’s media practices (Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte), as well as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “nostalgia for the sacred” (The Journal for Italian Cinema and Media Studies, forthcoming). Her Master’s dissertation advanced an intermedial reevaluation of the collage novels of Max Ernst. 

Marie-Louise holds an MPhil in Comparative Literatures and Cultures from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College), where she also completed her B.A. in German and Italian studies with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. She has also studied at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, and worked for publishing companies in Berlin and Munich as a translator, writer, and illustrator.