Programme 2026-2027
29 October 2026
5:45 pm
Katja Haustein (University of Kent)
Goethe's Tact and Austen's Delicacy, or: Theory as Practice
5:45 pm
Katja Haustein (University of Kent)
Goethe's Tact and Austen's Delicacy, or: Theory as Practice
In this lecture, Katja Haustein reflects on tact, understood as a special form of judgement that cannot simply be learned with the help of a book of manners, but rather appears as an ability to react intuitively and appropriately to a concrete situation. As a slight but meaningful deviation from codified forms of behaviour, tact emerged as a key concept around the time of the French Revolution, when traditional hierarchies and social norms were upended, and new modes of communication had to be found. The lecture explores the different articulations of ‘Takt’, frequently translated as ‘delicacy’, in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) and Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). Written in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, both novels feature similar thematic frameworks, including a country house setting, testing virtue in shifting romantic configurations, and the interplay between manners, morality, and landscaping. Both are novels of ideas, unpacking the relation between individual and society, and the tensions between habit, change, and excess. But the role of ‘Takt’ and ‘delicacy’ in both novels, Haustein wants to argue, is rather different. While Goethe associates ‘Takt’ with the individual’s resistance against societal norms, Austen integrates ‘delicacy’ into the broader social framework, emphasizing its function within established codes of civility. Taken together, both novels allow us, therefore, to tease out tact’s paradoxical structure. Tact oscillates between subversion and affirmation. As a ‘fine responsiveness to the concrete’ (Nussbaum), it continues to inform theories of human understanding to this day.
Dr Katja Haustein is Honorary Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent and author of Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters (CUP, 2023). Her new book, Touch, Tact & Technology, is forthcoming from CUP.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
Dr Katja Haustein is Honorary Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent and author of Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters (CUP, 2023). Her new book, Touch, Tact & Technology, is forthcoming from CUP.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
3 December 2026
5:45 pm
Roger Paulin (Trinity College Cambridge)
Creative Borrowings? Hölderlin and Kleist
5:45 pm
Roger Paulin (Trinity College Cambridge)
Creative Borrowings? Hölderlin and Kleist
How do poetic allusions function? How do authors read other writers’ works? What mental and cognitive processes are set in motion during the encounter with the alien text? Are these processes traceable? This paper deals with such questions, then examines what on the face of it seem to be borrowings, Hölderlin from Jean Paul, and Kleist from Zacharias Werner.
Roger Paulin is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German in the University of Cambridge, winner of the 2002 Humboldt Prize and was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz in 2011. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century literature, his latest publication is From Goethe to Gundolf. Essays on German Literature and Culture (Open Book, 2021).
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
Roger Paulin is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German in the University of Cambridge, winner of the 2002 Humboldt Prize and was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz in 2011. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century literature, his latest publication is From Goethe to Gundolf. Essays on German Literature and Culture (Open Book, 2021).
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
28 January 2027
5.45pm
Clemens Peck (University of Salzburg)
Goethe’s ‘Iphigenie auf Tauris’ and the Feminine Theatre of Diplomacy
The lecture will be preceded by the English Goethe Society AGM at 5pm.
5.45pm
Clemens Peck (University of Salzburg)
Goethe’s ‘Iphigenie auf Tauris’ and the Feminine Theatre of Diplomacy
The lecture will be preceded by the English Goethe Society AGM at 5pm.
Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787) has often been read as a 'humanisation of myth': where Euripides resolves the threatened violent confrontation through Athena’s intervention as dea ex machina, Goethe transfers the burden of resolution to Iphigenie herself. The lecture argues that the shift can also be understood through the history of gender and diplomacy. As a woman, foreigner, and priestess at the Taurian court, Iphigenie lacks sovereign authority, military power, and formal political office. Yet it is precisely she who mediates between Greeks and Taurians and transforms an imminent conflict into a negotiated settlement. Drawing on gender-oriented readings of the drama and on early modern debates about female diplomatic agency, the lecture places Goethe’s Iphigenie in dialogue with the figure of the ambassadress, particularly as discussed in Carl Friedrich von Moser’s L’Ambassadrice et ses droits (1754). The comparison brings into view a shared tension between formal exclusion and practical political agency. Goethe’s drama, it argues, stages a form of agency without office, in which mediation, sociability, and truthful speech become instruments of political action. Read in this context, Iphigenie auf Tauris emerges as a feminine theatre of diplomacy in which practices conventionally associated with soft power acquire decisive political force.
Clemens Peck is Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg and Director of the inter-university research centre 'Arts & Knowledge/Figurations of Transition'. His research focuses on German literature from the early modern period to modernity, with particular interests in literature and diplomacy, political representation, and Austrian literary culture. His recent publications include Masken des Staates. Deutsche Dramatik und europäische Diplomatie in der Frühen Neuzeit (Wallstein, 2024), as well as the co-edited volumes In Negotiation. Diplomacy, Literature, and the Arts (De Gruyter, 2025) and Praktiken des Neobarock in der Moderne (Sonderzahl, 2025).
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
Clemens Peck is Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg and Director of the inter-university research centre 'Arts & Knowledge/Figurations of Transition'. His research focuses on German literature from the early modern period to modernity, with particular interests in literature and diplomacy, political representation, and Austrian literary culture. His recent publications include Masken des Staates. Deutsche Dramatik und europäische Diplomatie in der Frühen Neuzeit (Wallstein, 2024), as well as the co-edited volumes In Negotiation. Diplomacy, Literature, and the Arts (De Gruyter, 2025) and Praktiken des Neobarock in der Moderne (Sonderzahl, 2025).
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
11 March 2027
5.45pm
The 2027 Prawer Lecture
Serena Bonaldo (University of Tübingen)
The Human, the Non-Human, and the Genesis of Conflict: A European Counter-Image in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s ‘Die Judenbuche’ (1842)
5.45pm
The 2027 Prawer Lecture
Serena Bonaldo (University of Tübingen)
The Human, the Non-Human, and the Genesis of Conflict: A European Counter-Image in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s ‘Die Judenbuche’ (1842)
Nature constitutes one of the central concerns of the Westphalian writer Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Within her prose, one work has occupied a privileged position in the critical tradition, a prominence that is reflected in its very title: Die Judenbuche. Ein Sittengemälde aus dem gebirgigten Westfalen. Unlike the author’s poetry, the novella offers no sublime landscapes suggestive of an ecologically meaningful totality. Instead, the natural environment is closely intertwined with the cultural sphere, most notably through the exploitation of timber resources. Accordingly, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the historical phenomenon of timber theft and capitalisation. Another strand of scholarship has explored the relationship between human beings and nature, a thematic constellation already inscribed in the novella’s title: Die Juden-Buche. Some interpretations draw on Kabbalistic traditions within Jewish thought, while others emphasise Christian symbolism, particularly the motif of the Tree of Life. This lecture contributes to these debates by arguing that the forest can be understood as a hybrid space: a zone of mutual imbrication in which nature is acculturated and culture naturalised. What has often been described rather generically as a mixture of nature and culture in the novella therefore calls for reconsideration within a more differentiated spatial lens. The relationship between nature and culture is by no means balanced or harmonious; rather, it is precisely this lack of harmony that necessitates a critical re-examination of their interrelation. Situated within the framework of postcolonial ecocriticism, this lecture not only offers a new perspective on Droste-Hülshoff’s prose but also situates the novella within contemporary debates in the environmental humanities and spatial theory.
Serena Bonaldo is a doctoral candidate in Modern German Literature at the University of Tübingen, pursuing a bi-national PhD programme in cooperation with the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her doctoral research, funded by the Cusanuswerk, examines the concept of 'Zwischenraum' at the intersection of Realism and 'Moderne'. The project demonstrates how spatial paradigms developed within Realist literature anticipate themes that have become central to contemporary literary studies, such as the third space, hybridity, contact, and conflict.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
Serena Bonaldo is a doctoral candidate in Modern German Literature at the University of Tübingen, pursuing a bi-national PhD programme in cooperation with the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her doctoral research, funded by the Cusanuswerk, examines the concept of 'Zwischenraum' at the intersection of Realism and 'Moderne'. The project demonstrates how spatial paradigms developed within Realist literature anticipate themes that have become central to contemporary literary studies, such as the third space, hybridity, contact, and conflict.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
22April 2027
5.45pm
Alexandra Hertlein (University of Oxford)
The ‘Ur’-Craze: How Origins Became Evidence around 1800
Goethe’s Urpflanze has become so thoroughly Goethean that it is easy to forget how crowded the linguistic neighbourhood was. Around 1800, the prefix ur- proliferated across German intellectual life: Urzeit, Urwelt, Urgeschichte, Ursprache, Urkraft, Urstoff, Urvolk, Urgranit. It did not carry a single, stable meaning. The prefix could mark what came first in time, what stood first in an order of explanation, or what seemed nearest to an uncorrupted state. In the dictionaries of Adelung and Campe, these senses repeatedly touch and blur. Ur- lends age the force of principle, and principle the prestige of antiquity.
The paper begins from that semantic instability. In the new temporal vocabularies of geognosy, Urzeit and Urgranit name a past pushed beyond familiar chronology by the expanding age of the earth; elsewhere, Urkraft and Urstoff turn firstness into causality, identifying an origin as the ground from which subsequent forms or forces proceed. Herder is a particularly revealing figure in this story. His language of beginnings repeatedly furnishes the lexicographers with examples, moving with ease between natural history, human history, language and culture. Campe’s entry for Urpflanze, tellingly, cites Herder rather than Goethe. Against this background, Goethe’s own ur-words begin to look rather different. The familiar question of what, precisely, he meant by Urpflanze or Urphänomen remains important; but it is no longer the only question. More revealing, perhaps, is the fact that ur- already offered him a vocabulary in which the earliest form and the underlying principle could be made to coincide. When Goethe recalled in 1816 that, in searching for the Urpflanze, he had unknowingly been seeking an 'Idee' or 'Begriff', he retrospectively shifted the term from botanical ancestry towards conceptual form. What can look like a private adjustment within Goethe’s morphology also belongs to a wider habit of thought: the readiness to let temporal beginnings shade into explanatory ones. The paper therefore places Goethe not at the origin of this vocabulary, but at one of its most self-conscious points of concentration. His ur-words become legible as part of a broader culture in which beginnings were asked to do epistemic work. The further origins receded from direct sight – into the depths of geological time, the conjectural past of language, or the ideal forms behind appearances – the more readily they could be invoked to account for what followed. The ur-craze names this paradox: a moment when first things became difficult to recover, yet increasingly powerful as forms of evidence.
Alexandra Hertlein completed her DPhil in German at the University of Oxford in 2026 with a thesis on ‘"Ursprünglichkeit" and Deep Time: Narratives and Concepts of Originality in German Literature around 1800.’ Before taking up an Early Career Research Fellowship in Modern Languages at St John’s College, Oxford, in October 2026, she was appointed a Stipendiary Lecturer in German at St Peter’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on German literature and intellectual history around 1800, with particular interests in Romanticism, the intersections of literature and the sciences, and the reception of antiquity.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
The paper begins from that semantic instability. In the new temporal vocabularies of geognosy, Urzeit and Urgranit name a past pushed beyond familiar chronology by the expanding age of the earth; elsewhere, Urkraft and Urstoff turn firstness into causality, identifying an origin as the ground from which subsequent forms or forces proceed. Herder is a particularly revealing figure in this story. His language of beginnings repeatedly furnishes the lexicographers with examples, moving with ease between natural history, human history, language and culture. Campe’s entry for Urpflanze, tellingly, cites Herder rather than Goethe. Against this background, Goethe’s own ur-words begin to look rather different. The familiar question of what, precisely, he meant by Urpflanze or Urphänomen remains important; but it is no longer the only question. More revealing, perhaps, is the fact that ur- already offered him a vocabulary in which the earliest form and the underlying principle could be made to coincide. When Goethe recalled in 1816 that, in searching for the Urpflanze, he had unknowingly been seeking an 'Idee' or 'Begriff', he retrospectively shifted the term from botanical ancestry towards conceptual form. What can look like a private adjustment within Goethe’s morphology also belongs to a wider habit of thought: the readiness to let temporal beginnings shade into explanatory ones. The paper therefore places Goethe not at the origin of this vocabulary, but at one of its most self-conscious points of concentration. His ur-words become legible as part of a broader culture in which beginnings were asked to do epistemic work. The further origins receded from direct sight – into the depths of geological time, the conjectural past of language, or the ideal forms behind appearances – the more readily they could be invoked to account for what followed. The ur-craze names this paradox: a moment when first things became difficult to recover, yet increasingly powerful as forms of evidence.
Alexandra Hertlein completed her DPhil in German at the University of Oxford in 2026 with a thesis on ‘"Ursprünglichkeit" and Deep Time: Narratives and Concepts of Originality in German Literature around 1800.’ Before taking up an Early Career Research Fellowship in Modern Languages at St John’s College, Oxford, in October 2026, she was appointed a Stipendiary Lecturer in German at St Peter’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on German literature and intellectual history around 1800, with particular interests in Romanticism, the intersections of literature and the sciences, and the reception of antiquity.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
20 May 2027
6pm
The 2027 Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture
Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff (University of Bielefeld)
Democracy in Germany. Do We Need More Goethe?
6pm
The 2027 Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture
Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff (University of Bielefeld)
Democracy in Germany. Do We Need More Goethe?
How does German democracy differ from British democracy? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the German model? What problems is German democracy currently facing? Should we be concerned about its future? And what do we see when we try to view the current situation through Goethe’s eyes? These are the questions the talk will address.
Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff is Professor Emerita of Public Law at Bielefeld University and a former Justice of the German Federal Constitutional Court, where she served from 2002 to 2014. She studied law at Bielefeld, Freiburg and Harvard Law School, subsequently completing her doctorate and Habilitation. Her research spans constitutional law, legal philosophy, environmental law and democratic theory. Before taking up her Professorship at Bielefeld in 1992, she headed the city's environmental protection office and later chaired the German Advisory Council on the Environment. Her publications include Das Dilemma des Rechts: Über Härte, Milde und Fortschritt im Recht (2017) and Demophobie: Muss man die direkte Demokratie fürchten? (2023), reflecting her longstanding interest in the relationship between law, political institutions and democracy. Her numerous distinctions include the Leibniz Prize (2000), the Hegel Prize (2012), an honorary doctorate from the European University Institute (2015) and the Ernst Hellmut Vits Prize (2024).
This lecture will be given in person (German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Please register HERE.
Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff is Professor Emerita of Public Law at Bielefeld University and a former Justice of the German Federal Constitutional Court, where she served from 2002 to 2014. She studied law at Bielefeld, Freiburg and Harvard Law School, subsequently completing her doctorate and Habilitation. Her research spans constitutional law, legal philosophy, environmental law and democratic theory. Before taking up her Professorship at Bielefeld in 1992, she headed the city's environmental protection office and later chaired the German Advisory Council on the Environment. Her publications include Das Dilemma des Rechts: Über Härte, Milde und Fortschritt im Recht (2017) and Demophobie: Muss man die direkte Demokratie fürchten? (2023), reflecting her longstanding interest in the relationship between law, political institutions and democracy. Her numerous distinctions include the Leibniz Prize (2000), the Hegel Prize (2012), an honorary doctorate from the European University Institute (2015) and the Ernst Hellmut Vits Prize (2024).
This lecture will be given in person (German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Please register HERE.
3 June 2027
5.45pm
Jim Reed (University of Oxford)
‘Irgend ein junger Mann aus Frankfurt der “schrieb” Goethe, Poetry and Things’. A Valedictory Lecture
The Thomas Mann quotation — 'irgend ein junger Mann aus Frankfurt...' takes us back to Goethe's beginnings. The lecture queries the old saying 'Poeta nascitur, non fit', then follows the ups and downs of Goethe's confidence in his calling, to the decisive point of Italy. It ends with a suggestion of what makes Goethe truly a born poet.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Please register HERE.
This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Please register HERE.