Stefan H. Uhlig

Education and degrees

PhD, MA, and BA, University of Cambridge

Research interests

I work on eighteenth-century and Romantic European writing, art, aesthetics, and material culture. Before I came to UC Davis I was a Fellow and Director of Studies at King's College in the University of Cambridge, and a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College and King's College, Cambridge. In Spring 2025, I will be a Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. To hear me talk about a sample of my interests, visit: https://tinyurl.com/5xdmw343.

Courses taught

COM 210 German Literary Worlds; COM 168A Romanticism; COM 142 The Romantic Self(ie); COM 210 Reading Comparatists; COM 210 Aesthetic Value; COM 142 (Not) At Home in Romantic Poetry; COM 195 The Bildungsroman; COM 141 Comparative Critical Theory; COM 164D The Enlightenment; COM 120 Writing Nature: 1750 to the Present; COM 7 Fantasy and the Supernatural; COM 210 Aristotle's Poetics and its Afterlives; COM 255 Comparative Literature: Past, Present, and Future; Freshman Seminars: Democratic Education; What is the Point of an Interpretation?.

Selected Publications

Book

Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography: The Formation of a Discipline at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Edited collections

Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism, co-edited and introduced with Yasmin Solomonescu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)

Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures, co-edited and introduced with Daniel Purdy and Chunjie Zhang, special issue of Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 54.2 (2018)

Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, co-edited and introduced with Alexander Regier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter, co-edited and introduced with Peter de Bolla (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Selected essays

“Literary Ethics in Kant, Schiller, Wordsworth, and Goethe,” in Handbook of Literary Criticism and Ethics,” ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2025)

“Rhetoric and Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge History of Rhetoric: Volume 4, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (1650-1900), ed. Adam Potkay and Dietmar Till (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025)

“Humboldt’s Populations,” in Latin American Literature in Transition, 1800-1870, ed. Ana Peluffo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 359–76

“Secondary Affect in Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai,” in Affect and Literature, ed. Alex Houen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 49–65

“Goethe’s Figurative Method,” in The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, ed. Paul Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 315–39

“Ferguson’s School for Literature,” in The Poetic Enlightenment: Poetry and Human Science, 1650-1820, ed. Tom Jones and Rowan Boyson (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 43–57

“The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric,” in REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Volume 28: Mobility in Literature and Culture, 1500-1900, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland, and Herbert Grabes (Tübingen: Narr, 2012), 237–64

“Wordsworth and Poetic Objecthood,” in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory, ed. Stefan H. Uhlig and Alexander Regier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 36–42

“Wordsworth, Gray, and the Ordinary Life of Poetry,” in The Meaning of “Life” in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ross Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2009), 33–56

“Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Verso, 2004), 26–53