Staff Profile

• Staatsexamen and M.A., Universität Konstanz
• PhD, University of Cambridge

Profile

Before joining Newcastle University, Bernhard Malkmus taught German language, comparative literature, and intellectual history at the Ohio State University for ten years. Prior to that, he held teaching positions at the Charles University in Prague, Pembroke College/University of Cambridge, and Goldsmiths University London.

Bernhard Malkmus teaches German literature and intellectual history from the 18th century to the present. His research covers Goethezeit and Romanticism, modernity and modernism, and contemporary culture.

His current research reflects on the way humans have imagined and envisaged their relation to nature, their role in the history of life, and their position in the web of life throughout the modern age. He has a particular interest in the history and philosophy of biology and ecology. Part of this research agenda is also the scientific debate on the Anthropocene and its social, political, and cultural ramifications. He is currently co-convening the Anthropocene Research Group at Newcastle University.

Bernhard Malkmus has held research fellowships at the following institutions:

• Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
  
• Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society, Munich
• Department of Philosophy, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg (DAAD)
• Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK), Vienna
• Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

He has a particular interest in poetry, both as a teacher, translator, and writer. Poets he has translated into German include Raúl Zurita, Peter Balakian, and W.S. Merwin. Currently, he is working on translations of poetry by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Sinéad Morrissey.

Apart from his work as a teacher and scholar, he regularly contributes to German and English language journals and newspapers, for example Times Literary Supplement, Neue Rundschau, Sinn und Form, Merkur, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Der Freitag.

Areas of Expertise

• narratives and theories of modernity
• environmental humanities
• ethics and aesthetics of nature
• nature writing and ecocriticism
  
• poetry and translation

Profile

In his current scholarship, Bernhard Malkmus explores the history of ecological imaginaries and their relation to other intellectual developments in modernity. He is currently working on a book-length essay entitled "Menschendämmerung: On Living in an Anthropomorphic World", which deals with the epistemological and ethical implications of the Anthropocene concept. His project "Safe Conduct: The Great Acceleration and the Literary Imagination" engages with the literary reflection of the explosion of industrial production and consumption since 1945 and its systemic implications for the human place in the biosphere. It deals with authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Arno Schmidt, Ernst Jünger, Marlen Haushofer, Peter Handke, Carl Amery, Peter Kurzeck, Christa Wolf, Wolfgang Hilbig, W.G. Sebald.

His publications in the environmental humanities include a special issue of New German Critique entitled Between Humanism and Posthumanism: The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities (co-edited with Heather Sullivan) and numerous essays on the Anthropocene debate, including an article on Max Frisch's environmental histories in PMLA and various book chapters on the writings of Peter Handke, W.G. Sebald, Graham Swift, as well as in Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Stanley Cavell and the French and German phenomenological traditions. He is currently working on an essay on Anthropocene aesthetics in major contemporary poets such as Anja Utler, Marion Poschmann and Esther Kinsky.

Bernhard Malkmus is interested in nature writing, both as a scholar and as a practitioner. He has edited a German version of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard in the Naturkunden series of the publisher Matthes & Seitz. For the same publisher he is currently preparing a book-length essay on the lynx, wilderness, and human civilization entitled Luchse: Ein Portrait (forthcoming September 2022).

He has collaborated with the Robert Walser Zentrum in Bern, Switzerland, on various occasions and is currently co-editing, with Peter Stocker, Seeland for the Berner Ausgabe of Walser's complete works at Suhrkamp Verlag.

He is co-editor, with Tanja van Hoorn and Christine Kanz, of the book series "Ecocriticism" at Metzler Verlag, Heidelberg.

Conferences

Professor Malkmus's teaching covers German cultural and literary history from the 18th century to the present. He is interested in embedding historical narratives in broader comparative cultural frameworks. Special thematic foci include the environmental humanities, the relation between the life sciences and the humanities, the theory and philosophy of history. Through the lens of the German intellectual legacy, in dialogue with other European cultures, his modules are exploring what it means to be a human individual, a social being, and a biological species in the web of life. Practicing foreign languages and thinking through a foreign culture affords us with a fresh perspective on these vital and pressing questions.

In 2012, Bernhard Malkmus was awarded the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring at the Ohio State University.

In 2021-22, Bernhard Malkmus is teaching on our School's survey on Literature (SML 1018) and the following undergraduate modules:

Ger 2013: Sustainability and Habitability: Nature and Ecology in the German-speaking world

Ger 4016: The History of the Future

He also teaches on the MA module "Data and Truth" for data science students.

• Malkmus B. Review of Jason Groves, The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. Modern Language Review 2022, 117(2), 308-312.
• Malkmus B, Stocker P. Robert Walser, Seeland. Berner Ausgabe 2022. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 17. In Press.
• Malkmus B. Becoming a Listener: On Robert Schumann's 'Bird as Prophet' (from Forest Scenes, op. 82). In: Mike Collier, Bennett Hogg, John Strachan, ed. Songs of Place and Time: Birdsong and the Dawn Chorus in Natural History and the Arts. Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2021, pp.62-81.
• Malkmus B. Drachenhäutungen: Peter Matthiessens Der Schneeleopard. In: Matthiessen P, ed. Der Schneeleopard. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2021, pp.327-350.
• Malkmus B. The Pampas as Zero Landscape: Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Moritz Rugendas, and César Aira. Modern Language Review 2021, 116(4), 527-552.
• Malkmus B. "Die Poesie der Erde ist nie tot". Robert Macfarlane gibt Landschaften ihre Sprache zurück. Neue Rundschau 2020, 131(1), 18-26.
• Malkmus B. Alexander von Humboldt Handbuch: Leben - Werk - Wirkung, ed. Ottmar Ette [Book review]. Modern Language Review 2020, 115(2), 483-486.
• Malkmus B. Lernorte des Lebens: Nationalparks im Anthropozän. In: Heurich,M;Mauch,C, ed. Urwald der Bayern: Geschichte, Politik und Natur im Nationalpark Bayerischer Wald. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020, pp.207-222.
• Malkmus B. Safe Conduct: The Anthropocene and the Tragic. In: Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes, ed. The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age. London: Routledge, 2020, pp.93-112.
• Malkmus B. Wilhelm Lehmann: Nature Writing als Verhaltenslehre. In: Dürbeck, G; Kanz ,C, ed. Deutschsprachiges Nature Writing von Goethe bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler, 2020, pp.207-226.
• Malkmus B. "Die Verbindung mit der lebendigen Welt". Robert Walsers Ästhetik der Evidenz. In: Pfeiffer A; Sorg R, ed. „Spazieren muß ich unbedingt.“ Robert Walser und die Kultur des Gehens. Paderborn: Fink, 2019, pp.83-98.
• Malkmus B. Der Erd-Erzähler: Peter Handkes Prosa der Orte, Räume und Landschaften by Alexander Honold [Book review]. Modern Language Review 2019, 114(3), 606-607.
• Malkmus BF. "Uns bleibt als Einziges der Name." Gespräch mit Ossip Mandelstam. Neue Rundschau 2018, 129(1), 243-252.
• Malkmus B. Maikäfer, flieg! Das Sterben der Arten und das Schweigen der Literaten. Merkur 2018, 72(2), 34-43.
• Malkmus BF. Narrative Zeugenschaft in Ursula Krechels Shanghai fern von wo. In: Jianhua Zhu, Jin Zhao and Michael Szurawitzki, ed. Akten des XIII. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Shanghai 2015. Germanistik zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2018, pp.245-250.
• Malkmus B. Robert Walser's Sceneries: "Kleist in Thun" and "The Walk". In: Frederick SM; Heffernan V, ed. Robert Walser: A Companion. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018, pp.171-189.
• Malkmus BF. "Man in the Anthropocene": Max Frisch's Environmental History. PMLA 2017, 132(1), 71-85.
• Malkmus BF. Father Trouble: Adam and Aeneas in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. American Studies 2017, 62(1), 67-85.
• Malkmus BF. The Anthroposcene of Literature: Diffuse Dwelling in Graham Swift and W.G. Sebald. In: Wilke, S; Johnstone, J, ed. Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond. New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp.263-295.
• Malkmus BF. The Senses of Slovenia: Peter Handke, Stanley Cavell, and the Environmental Ethics of Repetition. In: Schaumann, C; Sullivan, HI, ed. German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp.87-108.
• Sullivan HI, Malkmus BF. The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities: An Introduction. New German Critique 2016, 43(2)(128), 1-20.
• Sullivan HI, Malkmus BF, ed. The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities: Humanism or Posthumanism?. Duke University Press, 2016.