Corey Roberts

F. Corey Roberts
Assistant Professor of German

BA Calvin College, German/history (1994)
MA Indiana University , Germanic Studies (1997)
PhD Indiana University , Germanic Studies (2002)
(Dissertation: Speaking of the Unspeakable: The Pietist Conversion Narrative and Johann Georg Hamann's Aesthetics of Expression)

I was first exposed to German language and culture as a grade-school student when I lived with my family in a small town near Frankfurt for a year. Upon my return I continued to work with the language into high school and then in college. As an undergraduate, I spent seven months studying in southern Germany and Vienna , Austria and discovered that my interest in German overlapped nicely with a number of my other interests (European history, philosophy, art history, classical music). I decided to major in German and history and have continued to find the interaction of language studies and other academic disciplines to be very rewarding. In my teaching I try to integrate some of the things that have sparked my interest in German over the years, such as music, art, film and other culturally authentic materials. Over the past few years, I have become fascinated with the city of Berlin and I have been working to develop web-based and other teaching materials centering around the former and new German capital—a city which, in addition to being a dynamic cultural center, in many ways offers a microcosmic representation of the German experience over the last hundred years.

Research
My research currently focuses on two main areas—the emergence of the discipline of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany, and literary representations of sociopolitical organization and resistance from the Sturm und Drang and Early Romantics to the middle of the twentieth century. In a book manuscript currently in progress and tentatively titled German Pietism, the Discourse of Experience, and the Birth of Literary Aesthetics , I examine the narrative structures of the eighteenth-century tradition of Pietist autobiography and trace its influence on models of literary and philosophical aesthetics in the second half of the 1700s. I am also working on an essay that examines Richard Wagner's theoretical writings and his Ring cycle – in particular the opera Siegfried – for their implicit social critique and aesthetically driven notion of political revolution.

Publications
“Johann Georg Hamann's Historical Language and the Subjective Communication of Truth.” Herder Yearbook , 8 (2006): 119-132.

“Heinrich Heine's Lutherbild and the Singularity of the Historical Moment.” German Studies Review , 28.3 ( 2005): 583-98.

“German Pietism and the Genesis of Literary Aesthetics: The Discourse of Erfahrung in the 1700s.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte , 78 (2004): 200-28.

“ The Perennial Search for Paradise : Garden Design and Political Critique in Dorothea Schlegel's Florentin .” The German Quarterly , 75.3 (2002): 247-64.

Reviews
Review of Novalis: Fichte Studies , ed. and trans. by Jane Kneller. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003. German Studies Review , 28.2 (2005): 125-26.

Review of Vernunft ist Sprache: Hamanns Metakritik Kants , by Oswald Bayer. Stuttgart : Frommann Holzboog, 2002. Monatshefte , 96.1 (2004): 122-24.

Research and teaching interests
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century German culture

Aesthetic and literary theory
Business German
Discourses of religion
German literature since 1720
Literary representations of sociopolitical organization Twentieth-century Berlin

Professional Memberships
AATG – American Association of Teachers of German http://www.aatg.org
ASECS – American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/
GSA – German Studies Association
http://www.g-s-a.org
MLA – Modern Language Association
http://www.mla.org

Links
http://www.preussen-chronik.de
http://www.360-berlin.de/index.html?/features.html http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/
http://www.literaturwelt.com/