Shane Peterson (PhD, Washington University, 2012) and Christian Schneider (PhD, Heidelberg University, 2007) will serve as postdoctoral fellows beginning in Fall 2012.
Christian Schneider (right)
Christian Schneider is Assistant Professor in Medieval German Literature at Heidelberg University. He received his PhD in 2007 from Heidelberg University after moving from a study of Law to German Languages and Literature and History. He has studied in Passau, Norwich, Heidelberg, and Vienna. He also holds a master’s degree in German Literature and History from Heidelberg.
His research and teaching interests are in medieval narrative theory, late medieval courtly culture, pre-modern intellectual history, and textual criticism. He is the author of a monograph on the function of courtly ideals within the literary life of the Habsburg and the Salzburg courts in the 14th century. This work was supported by a scholarship from the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). He has co-edited a volume on medieval literary theory and another on medieval German love lyric. Forthcoming is a collection of papers from a conference organized by Christian Schneider, together with Florian Kragl, at Heidelberg University in 2011 on narrative logic (Erzähllogiken in der Literatur des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012).
His current research, for which he received the Volkswagen Foundation fellowship to work at Washington University (2012-13), is on the logic of storytelling in German medieval literature from the 12th and 13th centuries. He is interested in how the logical structure of medieval vernacular narrative was shaped by distinctly pre-modern modes of perceiving the world and creating meaning in the medium of literature.
Since July 2011, Christian has also headed up an editing project on Thomasin’s von Zerklaere Der Welsche Gast. This work is being done within the Collaborative Research Centre 933 (Material Text Cultures) at Heidelberg University, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
Shane Peterson (left)
Shane Peterson is Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his PhD in August 2012. His book manuscript, “Picturing the Text,” examines illustrated book editions of contemporary authors published between 1871 and 1890 (Hackländer, Marlitt, Raabe, Storm). He has studied in Mannheim, Vienna, and Göttingen. He is the recipient of a FLAS Fellowship (2005-6), Fulbright Research Fellowship (2010-11), and Department Teaching Award (2012). Currently he co-chairs the MLA Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession (2012-14).