A very warm welcome to my webpages!

My name is Anne Marlene Meuer and I’m a literary and cultural studies scholar from Germany with a strong focus on the history of ideas and philosophy of arts.

I’m currently a Research Fellow at >> Goldsmiths College in London and am also a member of the Young Academy at the >> Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz.

As a scholar, I am particularly interested in the borders where literature crosses over into other disciplines. I love both the depth of history and the upheavals of the present; the literatures of other languages as well as the expressions of other art forms.

My first two books deal with topics from the field of the history of ideas. In my PhD thesis >> Polarisations of Antiquity  (“Polarisierungen der Antike”) I examined the Enlightenment epoch as a process of modernisation in the history of culture and investigated the question of which main images and ideas were linked to the epochal upheaval. In doing so, I have demonstrated that the Enlightenment reception of antiquity is used as both a driving force and a basis of legitimation for emancipation from Christian orthodoxy. To this end, I have systematised various relationships between antiquity and Christianity from late antiquity to the present and fanned out the areas of thought in which antiquity functions as an instance of emancipation (to name them: historical thought, anthropology, cosmology, theology, poetology, social, legal and state philosophy).

I’m still very fascinated by studying the history of ideas. My most current research activities, however, focus on contemporary art: avant-garde research, digital and post-digital (language) art - and, specifically, "boundaries of the arts". 

I’m currently writing my third book on post-digital language art as an object of avant-garde research and am pursuing a series of conference and publication activities within the framework of the research group Boundaries of the Arts (“Grenzen der Künste”), which I co-founded. 

In teaching, it is important to me to convey literary history vividly and to make it possible to experience it concretely. Excursions to cultural events and museums are part of all my courses.

A great highlight of my postdoc period took place at the LMU Munich, where I completed most of my certified higher education didactic training as part of the university teaching qualification programme >>PROFiL - Professionell in der Lehre. In the context of the university teacher training there, 'teaching' was understood as the actual crowning glory of research: Research is not an end in itself, it only finds its fulfilment when it can be taught. This appreciation of the idea of university teaching and the great commitment of the Munich PROFiL lecturers to university didactics have had a great impact on me.