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, nation, and ideology in North America.

    My dissertation—“American Malleability: Aesthetics and Politics of Change in U.S. Literature and Print, 1820–1870”—analyzes what I term “malleability” in new forms of print beginning in the 1820s. I emphasize the history of theories of the human, the colony, and debates over who and what can be changed. The project argues for three new tendencies of print: 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.

    To complete the dissertation, I have conducted archival research as a Barbara L. Packer Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance Fellow, and a BAA Post-Graduate Research Fellow at Harvard.

    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

    • “‘The Great Panacea for All the Disorders in the Universe, Is Love’”: The Penitentiary and Women’s Health in Fuller’s Tribune and Child’s Letters from New-York,” Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Sorbonne University, Paris, France, October 2025 (forthcoming)

    • “1827: Freedom’s Journal, The Cherokee Phoenix, and the Birth of Radical-Critical Print,” Annual Meeting of the German Association of American Studies, University of Siegen, Germany, June 2025 (forthcoming)

    • “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 (1851) and Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845),” 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


    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: 1820s Print Revolutions and the Aesthetics and Politics of Change in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Amerikastudien / American Studies (Forthcoming, 2025)