Email: ffuchs@princeton.edu
Bluesky: @fuchsflrn.bsky.social / Twitter: @FuchsFlrn
my latest book released in 2023:
Florian Fuchs, Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature, 320 pages, Zone Books, New York
This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.
Reviews:
Brian Dillon at 4 Columns, May 2023; Thomas Pavel at Critical Inquiry, October 2023; Ian Ellison at Times Literary Supplement, December 2023
Since January 2024, I am a Permanent Research Scholar in the Faculty of the German Department at Princeton University.
My primary fields of research are comparative literature, media studies, art history, and environmental humanities. I work on material from the 16th to the 21st century.
In one of my current projects, I am writing an Archaeology of the Personal Device (badges, devices, Leibsprüche, imprese, talismans…). The project is an investigation of the set of practices enmeshing texts, objects, and the private self during the emergence of personhood in the early modern period.
I also work on a project entitled Theory Films: The Visual Afterlife of Theoretical Discursivity. In it, I study the use of moving images and videography as a theoretical medium, reflecting a shift since the 1960s from textual culture to visual culture in film works by Laura Mulvey, Trinh Minh-ha, Harun Farocki, and others.
I completed my PhD in 2017 at Yale University with distinction and spent the year 2013-14 with a Mellon Fellowship in the “Technologies of Knowledge” program for the integrated humanities. 2017-18 I was a Lector of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, and 2018-21 a Postdoc in German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
From 2021-22 I was a Junior Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center and in 2022 I was an International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany. From 2022 to 2024, I was a Research Postdoc in the DFG-funded EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin, where I also taught at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature.
Published in 2023:
Below Genre: Short Forms and Their Affordances, edited and introduced by Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn. Special issue of Colloquia Germanica – Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik, Band 56, Heft 2-3, 220 pages, Francke Verlag, Tübingen.
With contributions by Gabriel Trop, Florian Klinger, Jasper Schagerl, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn, Jan Mieszkowski, Erica Weitzman, Vanessa Barrera, Jodok Trösch, and Arne Höcker.
See full issue at Narr Digital
Published in 2020:
Hans Blumenberg, History, Metaphors, Fables. A Hans Blumenberg Reader, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll, 624 pages, Cornell University Press.
Reviews: Bruce Krajeweski at Critical Inquiry; Robert Pippin at Philosophical Quarterly; Marina Marren at Phenomenological Reviews; Jake Fraser at Germanic Review; Audrey Borowski at Times Literary Supplement; Marcos Guntin at Contributions to the History of Concepts; Joseph Leo Koerner at Common Knowledge
We were interviewed by the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (& Part II)