Xiaoyao Guo

Xiaoyao Guo is a PhD candidate in the German Department with a research focus on environmental humanities and media theory. His dissertation assembles an alternative genealogy of the modern landscape to propose a more relevant understanding of the concept for the current age of ecological exigency. Specifically, the project explores various modes of entanglement between human and nature within different historical topoi as represented in literature, visual art, and intellectual history in the German tradition. Taking a broad interest in literary, artistic, and cultural modernisms in the European context, he has also worked on Rainer Maria Rilke, text-image transmission, Surrealism, and the theory of the everyday.

At Princeton, Xiaoyao was the 2023-24 Graduate Affiliate in the Program in European Cultural Studies (ECS)  and the leader of the German Language Table from 2022-24. For the academic year 2024-25, he is a DAAD Doctoral Research Fellow at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the co-organizer of the IHUM reading group “Representing Ecology, Ecologizng Representation.” 

Xiaoyao joined the department in Fall 2021. He earned MA degrees in German and Art History at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, after receiving his B.A. from Peking University in German Language and Literature with a double degree in Economics. He has published Chinese translations of the German intellectual history.

Publication:
“Towards a Dialectic of Acrobatic Existence: Rereading Rilke’s Fifth Elegy with Nietzsche and Picasso,” in: Rilke’s Poetry and the Horizons of Phenomenology (De Gruyter Paradigms, forthcoming in 2025).