I am Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Junior Research Fellow at New College, both at Oxford.
My work bridges the Medical and Environmental Humanities by exploring the dynamics between human physical abilities (habit and skill) and the ecologies that they familiarize and shape. My interdisciplinary research draws on German and European modernist literature, philosophy, and dance, and is in dialogue with wider questions in the philosophy of embodiment.
My first book entitled Habituation in German Modernism explores how writers imagined the ways in which we adapt to new and/or unfamiliar environments by bringing German literature and thought of the early twentieth century – a time of immense social and material change in Europe – into dialogue with current research in the cognitive sciences. A more personal reflection on the book can be found in this blogpost.
My current research project Dancing Modernist Literature is funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. This project explores 21st-century dance adaptations of modernist literature – from Kafka's The Metamorphosis to Woolf's Orlando – and what these adaptations tell us about the continuing relevance of these modernist texts, imagining anew their concerns around sexuality, disability, aging, and gender through the body.
I am series editor of Brill's Bodies & Abilities in Culture, Literature, and the Arts and co-curator of Kafka: Making of an Icon, a major exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford and the Morgan Library in New York. I am also an associate researcher on the AHRC-funded Kafka's Transformative Communities Project.
I am a former professional ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher. I have danced leading roles in such ballets as The Nutcracker, A Streetcar Named Desire, Romeo and Juliet, Le Spectre de la Rose, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
meindert.peters@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
MONOGRAPHS
- Dancing Modernist Literature: Contemporary Adaptation and the Moving Body
(Under Contract with Edinburgh University Press) - Habituation in German Modernism: Embodied Cognition in Literature and Thought
(Camden House)
JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
- Circumscribing a Gesture: War, Breath and Memory in De Keersmaeker's Staging of Rilke's Die Wiese von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke
(Forthcoming in Dance Research) - No Creature of Habit? Gregor Samsa's Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita's Adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
(Forthcoming in The Journal of Modern Literature) - Hoffmann at the Ballet
(Forthcoming in E.T.A. Hoffmann in Context) - Manuscript Journeys
(With Katrin Kohl; in Kafka: Making of an Icon) - Kafka as Literature of the Absurd
(In The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature) - Benjamin in i10: Journalistic Networks, Exchange, and Reception behind a Dutch, Multi-Lingual, Avant-Garde Magazine
(In Monatshefte) - Introduction: Transatlantic Cognitive Cultures.
(With Shannon McBriar; in Symbiosis) - 'One Must Know How to Dance': Vicki Baum's Menschen im Hotel (1929), Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932), and a Choreography of Social Responses.
(In Symbiosis) - Revaluations Through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future.
(In Dance Research) - Heidegger's Embodied Others: On Critiques of the Body and 'Intersubjectivity' in Being and Time.
(In Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) - 'Trekt Heuvelman voor ons gezicht?': The Library of Writing-Master Johannes Heuvelman.
(In Quaerendo)
OTHER ARTICLES (SELECTED)
- Timely/Untimely (Book Review of Stanley Corngold's Expeditions to Kafka)
(In Review 31) - Only Fools and Horses
(In The Oxford Kafka Research Centre Blog) - Monthly Column 'Kafka in Oxford' (In Dutch)
(On Bazarow.com) - Book Review of Kata Gellen's Kafka and Noise
(In Seminar) - Between Box and Body: On a Dance Improvisation with Machteld Rullens's Cardboard Box Sculptures
(In ASAP/J) - The Swan / No More Dying
(In The Oxonian Review) - Movement Literacy
(With Patty Argyrides; in Modernism/modernity Print+) - Article Review of Sonja Boos' 'Reading Gestures'
(In The Journal of Literature and Science) - Interiors of (Un)Use
(In The Modernist Review) - A Love Story Nevertheless
(In The Oxonian Review) - Three Vertiginous Thrills and a Dud
(In The Oxonian Review) - The Fantasy that is Masurca Fogo
(In The Oxonian Review)
CREATIVE WORK (SELECTED)
- Mate (Choreography, premiere: 9 June 2011, TanzArt OstWest Festival, Gießen, Germany)
'Smashingly funny ... delightful, a highlight' ('Umwerfend komisch ... köstlich, ein Höhepunkt', Heiner Schultz, 11 June 2011, Gießener Anzeiger)