Fellow 2024-2025
Maud Meyzaud's current research examines narratives of (European) Enlightenment and secularisation as well as cross-culturally entangled histories of exile and diaspora between Europe and Latin America in the period of the Second World War by decentring traditional key concepts such as 'Western secularism', 'European enlightenment' and 'cosmopolitanism'. Her research areas range from poetics of revolution and the people to practices of historiography in the 19th century as well as literature and pauperism, and the theory of the novel. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, and her lectures have been invited by universities, art and theatre festivals and art institutions. Meyzaud teaches comparative literature and German literature.
Abstract
Caribbean Sketches of an Entangled World (1929-1949)
Drawing on different practices of diasporic Caribbean theorists and artists in the 1930s and 1940s Meyzaud argues that many current debates and some of the most difficult epistemological questions of our present can be traced back to the collective efforts made by the members of this first transatlantic Caribbean diaspora. The Nardal sisters and Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Jacques Roumain from Haiti, Alejo Carpentier from Cuba, and C.L.R. James from Trinidad built networks in Paris, London, New York, Mexico, Havanna, Fort-de-France, and Port-au-Prince, and participated in the socialist movements, surrealist and Harlem Renaissance circles, and ethnographical research of the period. Following Édouard Glissant, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and others, Meyzaud argues that the Caribbean was both a place that provided a ‘laboratory’ for the acceleration of the modernization process and a place where resistance to the Western project eventually gave birth to exceptional (trans-)cultural phenomena, from the creation of creole languages and the communities of the maroons to the political revolution of slaves and the first Black Republic in Haiti. She proposes that this is precisely, from the early 1930s onward, what made it possible for it to also become the place where the contradictions of Western modernity and its entanglements with other histories and forms of life could be best revealed and alternative modernities envisioned.
Education
2020 Habilitation Comparative Literature and German Literature, Goethe University Frankfurt
2009 PhD Department of Literature, University of Constance
2001 MA Advanced Studies in Philosophy, Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg,
Most Recent Academic Positions
Acting Professor Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich
Most Recent Publications
Formen des Gesprächs – Gespräch der Formen Diderot, Schlegel, Musil und die Theorie des Romans. Paderborn: Brill | Fink, 2022.
“Infrastruktur(en) der Orientalistik und Ästhetik der Aufklärung”. Sprache und Literatur 52, no. 1 (2023): 7–26.
“Flucht und Verflechtung. Zur Bildung eines ‚unsteten‘ Archivs der Literatur”. (special issue for Sprache und Literatur, edited with N. Taylor; under review; forthcoming 2024).