Meryem Deniz
Meryem Deniz received her Ph.D. in German Studies, with a minor in Classics, from Stanford University in 2023. She was a recipient of the Ric Weiland Graduate Student Fellowship, the Stanford Humanities Center Dissertation Prize Fellowship, and the Centennial Teaching Assistant Award. Her research and teaching focus on the questions of materiality, environment, and displacement in German literature and culture, with a focus on the long nineteenth century and contemporary transnational contexts.
Her current book project, tentatively titled Fluid Entanglements: German Romanticism and the Poetics of the Nonhuman, traces the emergence of a distinctive materialist poetics that considers “agency” a central element of the environment rather than a capacity unique to biological organisms. Drawing from the history of science and from new materialist theories, this research examines the ways literary experiments with fluid phenomena such as waves, crystallizations, and vibrations helped Romantics explore new aesthetic forms and ecopoetic modes of writing.
Deniz’s other major project draws on network theories to explore how artists of (post)migrant and refugee backgrounds mobilize “displaced objects” in their efforts to develop decolonizing, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and transcultural narrative strategies in contemporary literature and performing arts.
As a graduate student at Stanford, Deniz has taught courses in German language, culture, and literature and served as a teaching assistant in courses on poetry and sustainability. As an Acting Assistant Professor in German Studies this year, she will explore new topics and genres with students in the autumn and winter quarters (German 116: “Writing about Germany”). She will teach “Multicultural Germany in Contemporary Texts” (German 114) in the winter quarter and advanced German conversation (German 135/235), as well as “Turkish-German literature, cinema, and theater” (German 106/206) in the spring.
Publications
“The Entanglements of Matter, Mind, and Meaning: Novalis’s “Elastic Mode of Thinking,"" The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2023, Vol. 98 (3): 249-263.
“Jean Paul’s Acoustic Romanticism and Aeolian Soundscapes in Vorschule der Ästhetik and Titan,” Monatshefte, 2022, Vol. 114 (2): 220-241.
“Lessing’s Critical Hermeneutics and Elliptical Reading of Aristotle’s Poetics,” Lessing Yearbook, 2020, Vol. 47: 53-71.
“Tragedy as an Open Network: Antigone in Ferguson and The Nurse Antigone,” Reception Studies: New Challenges in a Changing World, ed. by Anastasia Bakogianni and Luis Unceta, De Gruyter, 2024, Forthcoming.
“Storied objects: Magical observation and postcolonial criticism in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s novel Adas Raum (2021)” (in progress)
“Maligned objects on stage: A new materialist critique of forced integration in Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s play Verrücktes Blut (2010)” (in progress)
“New Approaches to Romanticism,” Monatshefte, 2025 (review article; invited contribution)
Book Reviews
Dalia Nassar, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), Monatshefte, 2023, vol. 115 (3).
Jennifer A. Miller, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2018), Focus on German Studies, 2019, Vol. 25/26: 141-145.