Visiting Research Fellow, August 2021 – January 2022
Home institution: University of Heidelberg
Dr Tim Sommer is a Thyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and an Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Romanticism, Book History, The New England Quarterly, and the Harvard Library Bulletin. His first monograph, Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in October 2021.
At IASH, he will be working on a project that draws on literary history, heritage studies, and the digital humanities to analyse literary manuscripts as a cultural heritage phenomenon. Manuscript Fictions: Literature and Cultural Heritage from the Nineteenth Century to the Digital Revolution explores how authors, scholars, and the wider public have responded to manuscript material from the historical emergence of modern philology to the transformations of our own digital present. Reading literary texts in conjunction with institutional contexts and disciplinary history, the project offers a contribution to current debates in literary studies and cultural history about the forms of veneration, consecration, and appropriation that cluster around authors and the material artefacts associated with them.