Dr Christoph Schmitt-Maass

I was awarded my PhD at the University of Basel in 2007, for my thesis on contemporary German ‘ethnopoetics’, but have been working on the early modern period since 2007. In my ‘Habilitation’ (2017) I was interested in the question of how François Fénelon’s work “Les Aventures de Télémaque” (1699) was read, translated and printed in the German-speaking world in the Age of Enlightenment (1700-1832), and why. Subsequently, I wrote a study that, while starting from Walter Benjamin, asks about the ‘genealogy’ (in terms of Nietzsche) of literary criticism at the end of the 17th century. I was able to identify some practices that are still (or just again?) relevant in the Internet age. Most recently, I led a research project on the German-language reception of (French) Jansenism between 1640 and 1780, which resulted in two conference proceedings (so far). In addition, I am also interested in the history of scholarship, such as how the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ was appropriated in the German-speaking world around 1900, or to what extent the period between World War I and World War II was identified a ‘Second Thirty Years War’, or what relevance and scope a concept of ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ can claim. In addition, I have repeatedly worked on the history of Pietism and edited writings by Leibniz. Currently, I’m preparing a bigger essay about failure in Enlightenment (Pascal, Pope, Goethe).