Draft:Stefani Engelstein

Stefani B. Engelstein (born 1970) is an American scholar of German and British literature and the history of science. She is Professor of German Studies and of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Engelstein is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship..

Education and career

Engelstein received her BA from Yale University in Literature and her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago in Comparative Literature.

Engelstein taught in the German Studies program at the University of Missouri, Columbia from 2001-2015, where she also served as the Director of the Life Sciences & Society Program from 2009-2014. She moved to Duke University in 2015. She has frequently been a Visiting Scholar at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin and has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

Research

Engelstein's early work was at the front edge of a wave of literature and science in German Studies, which has since become a major area in studies of Romanticism. She has written two books, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY 2008) and Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017), which is forthcoming in German as Geschwister-Logik. Genealogisches Denken in der Literatur und den Wissenschaften der Moderne (Trans. André Hansen, De Gruyter, 2024).

Engelstein’s first book, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse, traced the way that the body and the scientific fields that investigated it came to be used to legitimate social organization in the modern period. Through readings in German and British natural history, philosophy, and literature, the book demonstrates a shift from using teleological explanations for formative biological processes to using them to legitimate social structures through reference to biology. Anxious Anatomy explores the epigenesis – preformation debate in research on reproduction and healing around 1800 and its relationship to social formations such as class, race, sex, and ethics.

Engelstein’s 2017 book, Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity, proposed the theoretical concept of “sibling logic,” which offers a new way of thinking about the genealogical systems that structured knowledge across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities beginning in the nineteenth century. The book argues that the definition of terms in a genealogical system is an effect of isolating sibling terms from each other, but that the boundaries between terms is contingent because of the similarity and overlap among sibling terms. This model applies to genealogies created for species, languages, religions, races, and subjects. Modern genealogical knowledge systems, on which collective identities have been built, are therefore both inherently unstable and yet invested with affect. The book explores the histories of these fields, as well as aesthetic experimentation with the models they proposed within literature.

Deborah Coen describes the historical method of the book as a “‘fuzzy’ genealogy of the genealogical disciplines, one that eschews a rigid model of branching in favor of attention to repeated crossings and mixings. This is an attractive template for historical studies that cross today’s disciplinary borders” She has written frequently on Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and has also written on William Blake, Jane Austen, both Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and other German and British authors.

Recognition

In 2023, Engelstein was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Fulbright U.S. Scholars Fellowship. She has also held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. Engelstein’s book, Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity, was short-listed for the Kenshur Prize, Center for 18th-Century Studies, Indiana University. Her article “On the Marionette Theater,” “Out on a Limb: Military Medicine, Heinrich von Kleist and the Disarticulated Body,” won the 2001 DAAD Outstanding Article Prize of the German Studies Association.

Works

Books

• Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity. Columbia University Press. Hardcover 2017. Paperback 2020. Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity
• Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture. Co-editor with Carl Niekerk. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 79. Rodopi Press, 2011. [1]
• Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Series: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. SUNY Press. Hardcover 2008. Paperback 2009. Anxious Anatomy

Selected articles

• “The Emergent Organism: Kielmeyer, Röschlaub, Schelling, and Novalis.” Special issue on Science, Technology, and Early German Romanticism. Ed. Leif Weatherby. Symphilosophie 3 (2021): 1-32.
• “Sexual Division and the New Mythology: Goethe and Schelling.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences special issue: Conceiving Reproduction in German Naturphilosophie. Ed. Susanne Lettow and Gregory Rupik. 42.3 (2020): 24 pages, Sexual division and the new mythology: Goethe and Schelling
• “Love or Knowledge: Sexual Epistemology in Fichte and Kleist.” Invited contribution. Special issue on Writing Polarities: Romanticism and the Dynamic Unity of Poetry and Science. Ed. Leif Weatherby and Antje Pfannkuchen. Germanic Review. 92.4 (Fall 2017). 368-387.
• “Geschwister und Geschwisterlichkeit in der Epistemologie der Moderne.” Invited contribution. Special issue on Schwesternfiguren / Sister Figures. Eds. Michaela Hohkamp, Almut Höfert, Claudia Ulbrich. L’Homme: European Journal of Feminist History. 68.2 (Fall 2017): 49-68.
• “The Allure of Wholeness: The Organism around 1800 and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate.” Critical Inquiry. 39.4 (2013): 754-776.
• “Sibling Logic; or, Antigone Again.” PMLA. 126.1 (Jan 2011): 38-54.
• “The Open Wound of Beauty: Kafka Reading Kleist.” The Germanic Review. 81.4. (Fall 2006): 340-359.
• “The Regenerative Geography of the Text in William Blake.” Modern Language Studies. 30.2 (Fall 2000): 61-86.
• “Out on a Limb: Military Medicine, Heinrich von Kleist and the Disarticulated Body.” German Studies Review. 23.2 (May 2000): 225-244.