WILLIAM KURRELMEYER, A&S 1896, 1899 (Ph.D.), who joined the Hopkins faculty in 1900 and remained for more than 40 years, molded the German program, and made Hopkins an international center for German scholarship. Dr. Kurrelmeyer’s fields of study included the history of aesthetics, lyric poetry, narrative theory, and the periods of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Much of his scholarship concentrated on the works of Goethe, Kleist, and Nietzsche. A discriminating book collector, he acquired nearly 25,000 volumes, which he eventually donated to the Eisenhower Library.
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Professor William Kurrelmeyer Chair in the Department of German
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Modern Languages and Literatures
Established in 1992 by the estate of Carrie May Kurrelmeyer Zintl in memory of her father
Held by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei
JENNIFER GOSETTI-FERENCEI, Ph.D., is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German at Johns Hopkins and holds a secondary appointment as Professor in Philosophy. Her research interests include Continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, cognitive literary theory, poetics, philosophy of imagination, and modernism, especially modern German literature, and is currently at work on topics in literary ecology and environmental themes literature.
She has previously taught for modern languages departments in the UK (Oxford and Birmingham, at the latter of which she was Chair and Professor of German and Comparative Literature) and was for a number of years Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, where she twice served as Director of Graduate Studies. She was recently a Visiting Fellow at All Soul’s College, Oxford, and at Johns Hopkins is the founding organizer of the Environmental Humanities Research Initiative. Gosetti-Ferencei received the D.Phil. in German and M.St. in European Literature from Oxford; M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Villanova; and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University.
Gosetti-Ferencei has published seven books, including: monographs on the construction of the exotic in German modernism, on the relationship between the quotidian or everyday experience and ecstatic reflection in phenomenology, modern art, and literature, a critical reading of poetics in Heidegger and Hölderlin, two monographs on philosophy of imagination, and on existential philosophy. Her book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, won The Paris Review Prize. Her work frequently explores the boundaries between philosophy and literature, poetic experience and cognition, and in addition to Hölderlin her work has engaged the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, J. W. von Goethe, and many other modernist writers. Her work in aesthetics has engaged the visual art of Paul Cézanne, Cy Twombly, Giorgio Morandi, Alfred Kubin, Georg Baselitz, and Anselm Kiefer.
Gosetti-Ferencei’s most recent book, Imagination: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2023), presents an interdisciplinary account of imagination, highlighting its importance in the history of philosophy (including Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein), aesthetics (including Schiller and Hölderlin), and phenomenological thought, and the crucial role imagination plays in cognition from scientific discovery to creative expression. Gosetti-Ferencei has also published a book on Existentialism, On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), which probes the historical and contemporary significance of existentialist philosophy and literature (including German, French, and other European thinkers and writers) for pondering human existence today, including our relationship to the self, others, the human world, our planet, and being as such. Gosetti-Ferencei’s current projects include two monographs: a work on nature and ecology in modern literary thought, including in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, and Rilke, and a monograph on the role of imagination in literature and the resources of literary imagination for human thinking.