Profile
Bernhard Malkmus is interested in how cultural practices shape our relation to the world. In particular, he explores how human engagement with the natural world has changed since the 18th century and how aesthetic practices such as literature, music, and the visual arts allow us to reflect on these changes. He looks at the history of modernity through the lens of environmental history and ethics. In so doing, he aims to understand in what ways certain cultural modes of imagination can be related to the systemic environmental problems we are facing today - and in what ways aesthetic practices can change our inherited modes of imagination.
Academic Biography
Bernhard Malkmus is a tutorial fellow at New College and took up his post as Professor of German and Environmental Humanities in 2023. Prior to that, he held teaching and research positions at Newcastle University, The Ohio State University, Goldsmiths University London, and the Charles University in Prague. He studied on the shores of Lake Constance at the Universität Konstanz and wrote his doctoral thesis under the leaden sky over the University of Cambridge on the fringes of the Fenlands. Research fellowships allowed him to develop his ideas in conversation with colleagues at Harvard University (2002), Internationales Forschungskolleg Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna (2014-15), Rachel Carson Center Munich (2015-16), Universität Bamberg (as DAAD Fellow 2016), Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (as Humboldt Fellow 2020-21).
Teaching
Bernhard Malkmus teaches papers across the entire undergraduate syllabus. Particular teaching interests include Goethezeit & Romanticism; modernity & modernism; literature & ecology; reading cultures, digital cultures & democracy; Germany and Europe. In the Hilary Term 2025 he gives a lecture series entitled "Of Humans and Other Animals: Reading German Canonical Texts in through an Environmental Lens".
He welcomes expressions of interest from prospective graduate students whose curiosity has led them into fields related to his areas of expertise.
This is one of his students:
Research
Bernhard Malkmus has published widely in the fields of Goethezeit and Romanticism, modernity studies, narratology, and environmental humanities. As a co-editor of the Ecocriticism series at Metzler, Heidelberg, he is interested in hearing about promising projects in the intersecting field of literature and ecology. He is also a nature writer and essayist who publishes regularly in newspapers and magazines.
Most recently, he has published a cultural history of the lynx with Matthes & Seitz, Berlin. Current projects include a literary history of the Great A cceleration, provisionally entitled "Menschendämmerung" and a book-length creative writing meditation on extinction, "Die Himmelsstriche der Seeschwalben". As a translator, he has worked on poetry by authors such as W.S. Merwin, Raúl Zurita, Peter Balakian; his completely revised edition of the German translation of Peter Matthiessen's nature writing classic The Snow Leopard came out in 2022. His diary-essay Himmelsstriche (Sky Lines) on bird life, avian flu, and extinction will appear in March 2025.
He will make certain aspects of his research available to the public at these forthcoming events:
September 2024: Workshop on Nature Writing, Burg Lenzen / Elbe
December 2024: International Conference on narrative genres and the Anthropocene in Vienna
Publications (selection)
‘Romantik und die Leiblichkeit der Musik’. In Roland Borgards and Frederike Middelhoff (eds.): Romantische Ökologien. Heidelberg: Metzler 2023, 83-103.
‘Vom Ausrotten erzählen’, Sinn und Form 75 (6/2023), 780-785.
‘Ulrike Draesner oder die Kunst des Nüsseknackens’, Dritte Natur 6 (1/2023), 203-2010.
‘The Pampas as Zero Landscape: Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Moritz Rugendas, and César Aira’, Modern Language Review 116 (2021): 527-52.
‘Anthropomorphism and Alterity’. In Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes (eds): Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity. London: Routledge 2021.
‘Safe Conduct: The Anthropocene and the Tragic‘. In Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes (ed.): The Anthropocenic Turn. London: Routledge 2020, 93-112.
‘Lernorte des Lebens: Nationalparks im Anthropozän’. In Marco Heurich and Christof Mauch (eds): Urwald der Bayern: Geschichte, Politik und Natur im Nationalpark Bayerischer Wald. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2020, 207-22.
‘Narrative Zeugenschaft in Ursula Krechels Shanghai fern von wo’. Dörte Bischoff (ed.): Fluchtgeschichten (IVG Shanghai). Frankfurt/Main: Lang 2018, 245-50.
‘“Die Verbindung mit der lebendigen Welt”: Robert Walsers Ästhetik der Evidenz.’ In Annie Pfeifer und Reto Sorg (eds): Spazieren muss ich unbedingt: Robert Walsers Der Spaziergang 1917-2017. München: Fink 2018, 83-98.
‘Sceneries in Robert Walser’. In Samuel Frederick and Valerie Hefernan (eds): A Companion to Robert Walser. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2018, 171-89.
‘Diffuse Dwelling: Landscape in Graham Swift and W.G. Sebald’. In Sabine Wilke (ed.): The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond. New York: Bloomsbury 2017, 265-97.
‘Senses of Slovenia: Peter Handke, Stanley Cavell, and the Environmental Ethics of Repetition’. In Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan (eds.): German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. London: Palgrave 2017, 85-105.
‘Father Trouble: Adam and Aeneas in Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March’. Amerikastudien/American Studies 62/1 (2017), 67-85.
‘Man in the Anthropocene: Max Frisch’s Environmental History’. PMLA 132/1 (2017), 1152-65.
‘The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities: An Introduction’ (with H. Sullivan). New German Critique, special issue 115/2 (2016), 1-20.
‘Jakob von Gunten’. In Lucas Marco Gisi (ed.): Robert Walser Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler 2015, 44-57.