Prof. Dr. Joachim Harst

Juniorprofessur Comparative Literature

Current Information

Joachim Harst is on leave from April 2024 to October 2026 to act as a substitute at Saarland University (Chair of General and Comparative Literature). During this time, Dr. Hanna Zehschnetzler will take over the management of the course.

Mailing Address:
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
50923 Köln

Address:
Innere Kanalstraße 15 (Triforum)
1. Floor, Room 1.17
50823 Köln

Tel.: 0221-470-76728
E-Mail: jharst(at)uni-koeln.de

office hours:

Tuesdays, 12 a.m., by appointment via E-Mail 

Position

The assistant professor for Comparative Literature and his team heads the master’s program for Comparative Literature at the University of Cologne, involving nine different fields of study within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Furthermore he represents Comparative Literature in the Faculty’s  wide array of disciplines.

Person

Since October 2018 Joachim Harst is Assistant Professor for Comparative Literature at the University of Cologne. After his studies of German Literature, Philosophy and History in Tübingen and Aix-en-Provence (which he finished with his master’s thesis Textspalten. Fetischismus als literarische Strategie in 2006), he worked at Yale University with Prof. Rüdiger Campe while writing his dissertation Heilstheater, which deals with the problematic relationship between Theater and Theology in the works of Kleist and Gryphius (finished in 2010). From 2010 to 2018 he worked as a Research Assistant at the Chair of Prof. Christian Moser (University of Bonn, German Department, Comparative Literature). Meanwhile he was member of the editorial staff of the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (ZÄK, 2008-2017) and the yearbook of the German Association for Comparative Literature, Komparatistik (2011-2017). Since 2011 Joachim Harst is a board member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft.

Recent Publications

• »Metaphorische Teleskopie. Rhetorik, Logik und Optik bei Emanuele Tesauro«, in: Romanische Forschungen 135(2) (2023), 165-188.
• »Machine Analysis: Westworld and the Media History of Psychoanalysis«, in: Therapie der Dinge? Materialität der Psychoanalyse in Literatur und den bildenden Künsten, hg. von Martin Bartelmus and Friederike Danebrock, Bielefeld: transcript 2023, 211-224.
• »Virtuelle Investigationen. Transformationen des Indizienparadigmas zwischen Sherlock Holmes und Forensic Architecture«, in: Medienkomparatistik 4 (2023), 23-44.
• »Verbriefte Ehe. Heloisa, Abaelard und Ovids Heroiden im 18. Jahrhundert«, in: Daphnis 51.2/3 (2022) Schwerpunktheft Briefpublizistik der Frühen Neuzeit, hg. von Christian Meierhofer und Björn Spiekermann, 522-547. (Volltext aus dem UKLAN)
• »Universalgeschichte des Ehebruchs.« Verbindlichkeit zwischen Recht, Religion und Literatur. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021. (Leseprobe, Volltext aus dem UKLAN)

Research Areas

• Law and Literature, esp. the notion of obligation and commitment in binding speech acts (oaths, curses, promises)
• Notions and Practices of Philology
• Poetics and Rhetorics of the Tragedy (from the ancient Greek andLatin tragedy to the baroque mourning play as well as the classicistic tragedy of Early Modernity)