Stefani Engelstein

Stefani Engelstein is a Professor of German Studies with a secondary appointment in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke.  She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. 

Her work addresses literature and science, gender, aesthetics, political theory, critical race theory, history of knowledge, and perspectives on nature from 1770 to the present, particularly in the period of Age of Goethe / Romanticism.  Engelstein has published two monographs: Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY, 2008). She also co-edited the anthology Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Rodopi 2011).  Authors to whom she returns include Goethe, Lessing, Kleist, Blake, Mary Shelley, Hoffmann, Kant, Schelling, Darwin, George Eliot, Wagner, and Kafka.

The first of Engelstein's current projects, Remembering Isn't Enough: Reflections from Germany on the Futures of Violent Pasts, explores the blind spots of German memory culture, which has been internationally so admired.  This book analyzes how the particular memory strategies Germany has engaged in, and the ones they have rejected, define the present.  Both foreign policy - towards Israel and towards the Ukraine, for example - and domestic politics, including the rise of the far right, are entangled with the specificity of these attempts to come to terms with the past.  Remembering Isn't Enough integrates reflections on Engelstein's own experiences and background with this analysis and points to the significance of negative as well as positive lessons that would be helpful for other countries with violent pasts. 

Engelstein's second current book project, The Making of Oppositional Sexes, analyzes German literature, the history of science, and philosophy around 1800 to trace the impact of a shift from anatomical to physiological understandings of life on concepts of sexual difference. The emergent paradigm of dynamically oppositional sexes also underlay new formulations of the relationship of the human to the social and the natural world, becoming essential to significant biological, epistemological, ethical, and ontological debates at the time. The book will conclude with the afterlife of oppositional complementarity in cultural and legal debates in the United States today.  

Engelstein’s most recent book, Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017), which appeared in German as Geschwister-Logik. Genealogisches Denken in der Literatur und den Wissenschaften der Moderne (De Gruyter 2024), investigated the genealogical sciences in the long nineteenth century.  Genealogies were developed to organize many historical systems and in the process transformed contemporary terms in such systems – whether languages, races, nations, species, or subjects – into siblings of varying degrees.  As a link between epistemology and affect, the sibling is a key to both knowledge-systems and identity politics that destabilizes genealogies from within.  Engelstein’s first book, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY, 2008), explored theories of reproduction and healing at the turn of the nineteenth century.  It traced the concept of teleology at the root of the new discipline of biology to reveal its transformation from an explanatory principle in new epigenetic theories of inheritance to a rationalization for legitimating ideologies through the body. Engelstein also co-edited the anthology, Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Rodopi 2011) and her work has appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, the PMLA, the German Studies Review, the Goethe Yearbook, and Philosophy Today.