Book talk with Adrian Daub - The Dynastic Imagination
Adrian Daub, director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, appears in conversation with guest scholars Dustin Friedman, Catriona MacLeod and Lauren Shizuko Stone to discuss his latest book, The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. The book offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of English, the Stanford Department of History, The Europe Center and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.
About the Speakers
Adrian Daub is the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Clayman Institute, a position he began in 2019. A Stanford professor of comparative literature and German studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Daub also serves as director of the Andrew W. Mellon Program for Postdoctoral Studies in the Humanities.
Daub is the author of six academic books: Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth Century Culture was published by Oxford University Press in 2014 (the substantially different German version: “Zwillingshafte Gebärden”: Zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung des vierhändigen Klavierspiels im neunzehnten Jahrhundert appeared in 2009). Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Romanticism and Idealism and Tristan’s Shadow: Sex and the Total Work of Art after Wagner appeared with University of Chicago Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. What The Ballad Knows will appear with Oxford University Press in 2021.
He is also an active cultural critic and political commentator. With Charles Kronengold he published The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a book of his German-language essays appeared with Hanser Verlag as Pop-Up Nation in 2016. What Tech Calls Thinkingappeared with Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2020.
Dustin Friedman is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at American University. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian and modernist literature, aestheticism and Decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and co-editor with Kristin Mahoney of Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1890s (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
Catriona MacLeod is Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the College and the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, where she is also affiliated with Art History.
She is currently completing a new book project, Romantic Scraps: Cutouts, Collages, and Inkblots, which explores Romantic practices with and theories of paper scraps. Her most recent book, Fugitive Objects: Literature and Sculpture in the German Nineteenth Century, appeared in 2014 with Northwestern University Press and was awarded the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for best book in Romanticism Studies. She also co-edited the volume Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures, which appeared in 2016, and two volumes of essays on Word & Image studies. Current President of the Goethe Society of North America, she is also senior editor of the journal Word & Image.
Lauren Shizuko Stone is Assistant Professor of German and Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Critical Theory at CU Boulder. Her teaching and research on German-language prose depictions of marginal figures in quotidian culture is animated by an interest in how literature renders a range of philosophical problems through poetic language. She is a co-editor and contributor to the volume Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics this Side of Seduction. (Fordham University Press: 2015)
Currently, she is finishing her first book manuscript, entitled The Small Worlds of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, and Prose of Early Life on the philosophical-poetics of 19th-century childhood. She is also beginning a work on her next monograph-length project that examines portrayals of queer desire from the standpoint of philosophy of language, phenomenology, and feminist theory.