MEINDERT PETERS

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 (PI: Carolin Duttlinger). As part of this Project, I was part of the team that worked with award-winning choreographer Arthur Pita on a new adaptation of Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' for which I held both a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellowship grant (PI: Barry Murnane) and a New College Ludwig Fund grant.

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

JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

OTHER ARTICLES (SELECTED)

CREATIVE WORK (SELECTED)