My book Van Gogh in Paris: Malerei und Ausdruck in der Moderne (2025) is centered around van Gogh’s artistic engagement with the topography of Paris and develops an account of his oeuvre’s defense of artistic self-expression against the pressures of affective formalism in European modernism. The manuscript for the book was awarded the Faculty Prize of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Basel, sponsored by the L. & Th. La Roche Foundation.

I am currently working on a longer essay on Honoré Daumier’s large series of Don Quijote paintings. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s contemporaneous conception of repetition as a mode of existence, I understand Daumier’s sustained return to Cervantes’s protagonist as a painterly inquiry into the novel’s fraught capacity to provide orientation in a heteronomous modern world. In Daumier’s serial reworking, I argue, the act of novel reading and a non-heroic yet not ridiculous Don Quijote form a commentary on shifting regimes of masculinity, heroism, and modern ways of life in the mid-nineteenth-century, addressing men who, at the threshold between an honor-based feudal society and a contract-based social order, sought stability in performing chivalric ideals of masculine identity within an emergent bourgeois-liberal French society.

Lebenslauf

Forschungsschwerpunkte

Stipendien, Auszeichnungen, Projekte

Tagungen

Publikationen

Lehre