Marcel Schmid

I am a currently the Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Arts and Sciences (National Endowment for the Humanities) and an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Programs at the German Department at the University of Virginia (UVA). I am also serving as the Interim Director of UVA’s Center for German Studies.

I teach classes in German language, literature and culture, particularly on Serial Media, early German environmental movements, and Fairy Tales, which I established as popular courses in the German curriculum.

I studied history, German literature, and art history at the University of Zurich, Yale, and New York University, and I wrote a dissertation on the concept of autopoiesis in literature. I have been a visiting scholar at Yale and Brown University, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

I am interested in literary history, specifically relating to the German Life Reform movement and the interface between literary analysis and technology. In the past few years, I have written and edited books on self-reference in literature (Autopoiesis und Literatur , Self-reflection in Literature) and the life reform movement (Die Literatur der Lebensreform). I have also published in the Feuilleton of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and in Feedback on car aesthetics. My latest co-edited volume analyzes the writings of the Swiss author Christian Kracht: The Case of Christian Kracht (Brill series “German Monitor” 2024). Currently, I am working on a book project on car aesthetics, and co-editing a volume on Humanities Under Fire: Reorienting Usefulness (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan).