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After studying Philosophy, German Literature, and Law in Bonn, Paris, and Berlin, Christian defended his PhD in German Literature at Harvard University in 2022, where he has worked as a Postdoctoral College Fellow until joining Grinnell in the Fall of 2024.

In his research, Christian focuses on the materiality, mediality, and performativity of text and other media, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries and in Romanticism. His research also comprises fields and topics such as: opacity; posthumanism and eco-criticism; migration, otherness, and belonging; urbanism and theories of (public) space; geology and mineralogy; gender and sexuality; new materialism; process ontology; phenomenology; and visual studies.

His first monograph, titled “The Tenacity of Text,” which is under contract with De Gruyter for the Paradigms series, investigates the effects that graphic, stylistic, and semantic elements have on reading and interpreting literary texts. Drawing from phenomenology, media theory, and new materialism, it looks at the material ground of interpretations beyond and beneath semiotics. In exemplary readings of prose works by Ilse Aichinger, Elfriede Jelinek, Uwe Johnson, and Arno Schmidt, the book develops the critical categories of facture, gravity, and sedimentation to describe three distinct moments of the reading process that frame and influence all aspects of reception. It introduces the term “tenacity,” which derives from mineralogy, and encompasses these categories to refer to the distinct resistance that texts exhibit during reading—and the resilience of text to its readings. By doing so, “The Tenacity of Text” shows that the plurality of interpretations characteristic of literature is anchored in a text’s material tenacity, and that the politics of interpretation emerges from the material dynamics of textuality.

Christian’s second larger research project centers on various productive forms of opacity in the context of political representation (Hannah Arendt, Édouard Glissant, Jean-François Lyotard, Achilles Mbembe) and media studies (Eyal Weizman, Orit Halpern). He is also working on an edited volume on posthumanism around 1900 and on articles on Alfred Döblin, on eco-criticism in contemporary German texts, and on materiality in E.T.A. Hoffmann's “Die Serapions-Brüder.”