Joela Jacobs, Ph.D.

Joela Jacobs received her Ph.D. in Germanic studies from the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching bring together 19th-21st century German literature and film, animal studies, environmental humanities, Jewish studies, the history of sexuality, and the history of science. She has published on monstrosity, multilingualism, literary censorship, biopolitics, animal epistemology, critical plant studies, and contemporary German Jewish identity. Currently, she is working on a monograph that examines a persistent engagement with the ambiguity of the human and non-human in the modernist German micro-genre of the literary grotesque. With its vegetal, animal, and marginalized human figures, this genre created a field of artistic experimentation that allowed for the transgression of categories such as species, race, and gender by dramatizing the fragility of the anthropocentric point of view and exploring the possibilities of expression at the limits of language.