Dr Sebastian P. Klinger connects literary studies to the history of science. His scholarship explores how literature interacts with broader cultures of knowledge and draws on discourse analysis and close attention to language and media as comprehensive frameworks for understanding cultural history in the modern period. His first book project, How to Do Sleep with Words: Sleep Experiments in Literature, Science, and Society, 1899–1929, investigates the representation of sleep in natural scientific inquiry and German and French literary discourse. His second project, Narrative Ecologies, continues to explore the interdependences between material culture, literary expression, and natural scientific research. Dr Klinger’s wider research and teaching interests comprise German and French poetics, the history of modern subjectivity, dimensions of human finitude, and the troubled trajectory of Western thought. Before joining New College, University of Oxford as the Matthews Junior Research Fellow, he received his MA and PhD from Princeton University.

Selected Publications

• “Political Theology or Theological Politics? Hugo Ball, Early Christian Hagiography and a New Vision for Society”, Representations 152 (2020), 85102.
• “Ein Wort, das ich vor einiger Zeit bei Leo Schestow gelesen habe”. Eine neue Lektüre Paul Celans, Jahrbuch der deutschen SchillerGesellschaft 59 (2015), 235–257.