Bernhard Malkmus

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Bernhard Malkmus

Information

Professor of German Studies, Head of German

Newcastle University:

School of Modern Languages

EMAIL: bernhard.malkmus@newcastle.ac.uk

See Bernhard's NCL page >

Motivation

"I will never forget when my roommate during the third undergraduate year, a brilliant engineering student, gave me a paper on changing saline concentrations in the North Polar Sea. That was in 1996, and the explanation wasn't exactly unheard of but still quite unfamiliar: climate change. As a potential consequence the authors projected the slowing down or even total collapse of the gulf stream. I immediately knew that this would occupy me, in one way or another, for the rest of my life."

BACKGROUND

"I am convinced that the global ecological crisis is also a deep crisis of human imagination. In my work as an intellectual historian, I am trying to understand the genealogy of ideas that have catalysed this crisis and I am exploring ethical and aesthetic practices that address our ecological predicament."

Interests/Research

"I am currently working on a cultural history of the lynx, an animal that epitomizes a central issue of the Anthropocene: Are humans prepared to temper their totalized managerial approach to nature and allow other creatures to modify our landscapes and practices of usage? Can we learn an attitude of 'letting be' from a fellow creature like the lynx? A major research project of mine is dedicated to the exploration of the Great Acceleration in the post-war literary and philosophical imagination."