Andrew Wildermuth 



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Andrew Wildermuth is a literary scholar and poet, at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. From Annapolis, Maryland, he’s lived in Germany since 2018.

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    I am a doctoral researcher in “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics,” at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. I work in the chair of Heike Paul and teach courses in English and American Studies. I am interested in critical theory, poetry, nineteenth-century literature, and race and nation in North America.

    In fall semester 2024–25, I am on fellowship in Massachusetts, with support as a Barbara L. Packer Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Thoreau Society Fellow, and a BAA Post-Graduate Research Fellow at Harvard University. In archives in Massachusetts, I will conclude work on my PhD dissertation.

    My dissertation—“American Malleability: Aesthetics and Politics of Change in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature”—analyzes what I term “malleability” in U.S. literature, from 1820–1870. I emphasize engagements with the human, the colony, and debates over who and what can be changed. The project traces three primary tendencies: the liberal-reform, the radical-critical, and the nihilist avant-garde. Authors considered include, among others, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, William Apess, Frances Harper, John Rollin Ridge, and Emily Dickinson.

    I am inspired especially by historicist and poststructuralist scholarship with an eye toward the relations between discourse, affect, and the flesh—including the work of Hortense Spillers, Michel Foucault, and Lauren Berlant.

    Here is my department website.


    Papers and Talks

    • “Malleability in American Periodical Cultures, 1820–1850,” American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, September 2024

    • “Tale Twice Told: Law, Indigneous Sovereignty, and Reforming Boston in Apess’s Indian Nullification (1835) and Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852),” Nineteenth-Century Global Cities and Urban Worlds: Symposium of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, Aix-Marseille University, France, June 2024

    • “‘My Heart, a Wall / of Living, Loving Clay’: Feeling, Flesh, and Malleability in Frances Harper’s Moses: A Story of the Nile,” Final Conference of Voices/Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600–1865, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, March 2024

    • “‘Pamphlets of a Very Seditious & Inflammatory Character’: Inflammation and Injury in Walker’s Appeal,” Symposium of the British Association for Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Bristol, England, December 2023

    • “She, He, and We: Pronouns, Protest, and the Politics of Baez–Dylan in D.C.,” Sentimental Ballads in Popular Music, International Symposium, University of Siegen, Germany, September 2023

    • “Foraging, Forging, Forgoing: Thoreau as Settler Disaster,” Annual Conference of the Bavarian American Academy, Munich, Germany, July 2023

    • “Reading the Body Politic: Phrenology, Ideology, and the Malleable in Melville’s Moby Dick and Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” Annual Conference of the British Association of American Studies, Keele University, England, April 2023

    • “Reading, Liberatory Violence, and Malleability in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Infrastructures of Racism and the Contours of Black Vitality and Resistance: An International Conference, University of Torino, Italy, March 2023

    • “Margaret Fuller’s Life and Work,” Lecture in “History of American Literature: The American Renaissance,” University of Jena, Germany, May 2022


    Reviews

    • Review of Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America, by Scott Gac, 2024, Cambridge University Press, in Amerikastudien / American Studies (Forthcoming 2025)

    Book Contributions

    • “Foraging, Forging, Forgoing—or, Thoreau’s Settler Disaster in the Age of Walker and Apess,” 2025 Annual Publication of the Bavarian American Academy on “Environmental Citizenship,” Univeristätsverlag Winter (Forthcoming, 2025) 


    Peer-Reviewed Articles

    • “American Malleability: Aesthetics and Politics of Change in the Case of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” Amerikastudien / American Studies (Forthcoming, 2025)