Nathan Taylor has served as Research Director of the Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften / Frankfurt Humanities Center since 2023. His research focuses on German-language and transnational literature since the late 18th century, asking how aesthetic forms relate to shifting social configurations. His work draws on a broad corpus of critical theory to examine problems of literary and economic value, histories of fugitivity, displacement, and exile in relation to global logistics chains, and contemporary poetics.
Nathan Taylor joined the German Department of the Goethe-University in 2017, where he coordinated the interdisciplinary Masters program in Aesthetics. After studying German and Economics at Austin College and the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Nathan Taylor completed his PhD in German Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 2017. His research has been financed by an International Mellon Fellowship of the Science Research Council, a research fellowship from the DAAD, and a Fulbright Grant to Germany. He has served on the editorial board of diacritics.
His talk, “Fugitive Logistics: Unsettling the German Archive,” is drawn from his forthcoming book of the same name with Cornell University Press. It shifts from discourses of value to global value chains and draws on an emerging field of ‘infrastructural’ and critical logistics studies to rethink paradigms of exile and Atlantic migration in German Studies.
This event is co-sponsored by GNS+, European Studies, and the UW Madison International Division.