Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch

Biography

Cornelia Zumbusch is a Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Hamburg. She was a fellow of the DFG Graduate School 'Body-Stagings' at FU Berlin from 2000 to 2002. Her dissertation, 'Science and Images: Symbol and Dialectical Image in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk,' earned her the Scientific Prize from the Aby Warburg Foundation in 2006. From 2003 to 2010, Zumbusch worked at the Institute of German Philology at LMU Munich, where she earned her habilitation in 2009 with a thesis on 'The Immunity of Classicism: Purity, Protection, and Insensitivity in Schiller and Goethe.' She has held teaching positions at the University of Konstanz and has been a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on literary, poetics, and aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries; image theories; cultural philosophy; and the theory of prose and narrative. She is currently the co-director of the Warburg House and the director of the DFG Research Group 'Imaginaries of Power.' Zumbusch's current projects include examining the cultural history of care and energy landscapes through literature.

Research Interests