Dennis Schäfer

Dennis Schäfer is a 6th year Ph.D. student. Dennis has a general interest in the study of the 18th and 19th century and is particularly interested in film & media studies, book history, European romanticisms, Western Marxism, and memory culture in Central Europe. He is also an avid bibliophile and book collector.

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, a visiting scholar at the DFG Graduiertenkolleg “Modell Romantik” at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and a Werner Keller Stipendiat of the Goethe Gesellschaft in Weimar. In 2024/2025, he will be a Dissertation Writing Fellow with the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).

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 the role of the amanuensis in the writing cabinet of literary authors and in the preservation of manuscripts for personal archives.

Dennis’s work has appeared, among others, in the E.T.A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch, Expressionismus, and the Zeitschrift für Germanistik, and he has reviewed books for the Goethe Jahrbuch, the Goethe Yearbook and Oxford German Studies.

Recent Publications

“Her Own Hand: Female Agency around 1800”, co-edited with Helga Müllneritsch, Publications of the English Goethe Society 93.3. (forthcoming)

“Manuskriptkulturen im Buchzeitalter“, co-edited with May Mergenthaler, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 48.2. (forthcoming)