Xiaoyao Guo

Xiaoyao Guo is a PhD candidate in the German Department with a research focus on ecocriticism and media theory. His dissertation assembles an updated aesthetics of modern landscape to propose a more relevant understanding of the concept for the contemporary age of the Anthropocene. Specifically, the project explores various modes of sensibility as tensional entanglement between human and nature through different historical topoi in literature, visual art, and intellectual history in the German and European traditions. He has written for the Umwelt-Wiki project (Ohio State University), and has forthcoming publications on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the contemporary representation of the Arctic as well as the ecopoetics of weathering. His research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), American Friends of Marbach (AFM), the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA), New German Critique, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), among others.

At Princeton, Xiaoyao has been active in the Program in European Cultural Studies (ECS), the Prison Teaching Initiative as well as the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). He was a Doctoral Research Fellow at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in AY 2024–25. Xiaoyao joined the department in Fall 2021. He earned M.A. 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 also published Chinese translations of German intellectual history.