Wolfram Schmidgen

Associate Professor, Department of English

Office Contact Information

Degree:

Ph.D., University of Chicago

Degree:

M.A., Free University Berlin

Degree:

M.A., Binghamton University

Mailbox:

Campus Box 1122
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Phone:

314-863-6735

Email:

wschmidg@artsci.wustl.edu

Research Specialization

Eighteenth century literature and culture

Awards:

NEH fellowship, Folger Library, 2007-2008.
Faculty fellow, Mellon Seminar “The Souls of Things,” Vanderbilt University, Spring 2006 and 2007.
Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor, Washington University, 2005-2006.
Fellow at the Summer Institute on

Tristram Shandy at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, Summer 2005.
Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 1996-1997.
Century Fellowship, University of Chicago, 1992-1996.
DAAD Fellowship (German Academic Exchange Service), 1988-1989.

Curriculum Vitae:

Wolfram Schmidgen's Vitae

Biographical Information

Professor Schmidgen's research focuses on the interplay between literature, law, philosophy, and science.

In his first book, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Professor Schmidgen shows how the detailed couplings of persons and things in eighteenth-century descriptions question the limits of identity and community. He argues that the history of objectification needs to be rewritten. It is not the simple narrative of a progressive alienation of human and material spheres, but a transgressive romance populated by some strange hybrids: commodities that prove immovable, land that is movable, things that assume human agency, and spaces that threaten to devour or gently incorporate you. In creating such unenlightened hybrids, eighteenth-century legal, economic, and literary texts ask us to reexamine what it means to be modern.

Professor Schmidgen is currently working on Illegitimate Bodies: Mixture and British Culture, 1660-1740, a book that argues for mixture as a subversive mode of modernization that infects the development of genres, political theory, and science. His work has appeared in Journal of British Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, MLQ, ELH, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in the Novel. His courses cover a range of topics in the long eighteenth century, including commercial culture, sexuality, identity, the novel, gender, and the idea of modernization.