Antje Schmidt, M.Ed.

Curriculum

Antje Schmidt was a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project Poetry in the Digital Age at the University of Hamburg from 2023 to 2025, where she researched ecology-technology relations in multimodal 21st century poetry. In spring 2024, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Department of English and Comparative Literature and at the Digital Humanities Center at San Diego State University at the invitation of Prof. Jessica Pressman. From 2019 to 2022, she worked as a research associate in the Thyssen Foundation-funded project Vanitas in den Künsten der Gegenwart (‘Vanitas in Contemporary Art’). She received her doctorate with distinction in 2023 under the supervision of Professor Claudia Benthien with a dissertation on Vanitas in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartslyrik (‘Vanitas in Contemporary German-language Poetry’).

Her research focuses on German-language literature of the seventeenth century and the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, particularly contemporary poetry, as well as on literature and ecology, literature and post digitality, critical posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminist and gender studies. Her habilitation project investigates literary constructions of the soil in the literature of the long nineteenth century, combining literary analysis with ecocritical, feminist, and postcolonial approaches.

Publications (selection)

„‚ich wollte, der Rasen wüchse so über mich‘. Melancholische Böden in Büchners Leonce und Lena“. Büchners Elemente. Ed. by Roland Borgards, Esther Köhring and Oliver Völker. Georg Büchner Jahrbuch 18 (2026) [in preparation].
Posthumane Verflechtungen. Lyrik im Technozän. Ed. by Antje Schmidt. In collaboration with Anna Hofman. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026. (=Poetry in the Digital Age) [in press].
Vanitas und Gesellschaft. Ed. by Claudia Benthien, Antje Schmidt and Christian Wobbeler. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716016.
„Seekabel und Sabotage. Carla Cerdas posthumanistische Infrastrukturpoetik“. Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 4 (2025): pp. 41–68. https://doi.org/10.28937/9783787351442_2.
„Audiovisual Poetry“. With Anna Hofman. Poetry in the Digital Age. An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. by Claudia Benthien, Vadim Keylin and Henrik Wehmeier. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025, pp. 203–213. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111704548-018.

Research project: Ecofeminist Perspectives on Earth as an Elemental Force in Long Nineteenth-Century Literature

The research project examines literary imaginaries of the Earth as a force-endowed entity. It focuses on the literature of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, a period marked by major environmental, social, technological, and economic transformations that proved decisive for the nature-culture history of Western modernity – most notably the emergence of modern industrial capitalism and influential emancipation movements.

The project centers on literary representations of the Earth’s metabolic exchanges with other forces – such as human bodies, tools, and working animals – as they emerge in embodied practices including mining, dyke building, gardening, and agriculture. Particular attention is given to gendered constructions of terrestrial forces and to the ways in which agency, potentiality, and activity as well as impotence and passivity are attributed to them. The study asks in which literary representations the Earth is granted or denied agency, and how these constructions intersect with tendencies to feminize the Earth. Is metabolic exchange with the Earth narrated as crisis-ridden and dangerous, or as nourishing and symbiotic? Which literary traditions, genres, and narrative strategies shape these different modes of representation?

Methodologically, the project brings together approaches from material ecocriticism, ecofeminist studies, and elemental ecocriticism. Its aim is to historicize recent Anthropocene-related claims about the (often crisis-driven) agentiality of soils and to expand these debates through a gender-theoretical perspective.