Prof. Dr. Christiane Frey

Curriculum

Christiane Frey is Associate Professor of German at Johns Hopkins University and Co-Director of the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought. She previously taught German and Comparative Literatures as well as the History of Science at the University of Chicago, Princeton University, New York University, and, in Germany, at the Humboldt University Berlin and the RWTH Aachen University. She was an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow at the HU Berlin and a Leibniz-Fellow at the University of Konstanz. Her research and teaching focuses on early modern literature, astronomy, and religion; political theologies and the Baroque mourning play; literary and medical anthropology; possible worlds; micrologies of knowledge; literary ecologies; theories of secularization.

Publications (selection)

Milieus of Minutiae: Contextualizing the Small in Literature, Philosophy, and the Sciences, ed. by Christiane Frey and Elizabeth Brogden. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2024 (in press).
Below Genre: Short Forms and Their Affordances. Special issue of Colloquia Germanica – Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 56: 2-3, ed. by Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs and David Martyn. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2023.
„Die Zeit der Ellipse: Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Keplers Astronomie“, in: Ästhetische Eigenzeiten der Wissenschaften, ed. by Michael Gamper, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2020, pp. 17–72.
„Kleinformate und Monadologie: Leibniz, Benjamin“, in: Barock en miniature – Kleine literarische Formen in Barock und Moderne, ed. by Pauline Selbig et al. Berlin/New York: DeGruyter, 2020, pp. 135–176.
Laune: Poetiken der Selbstsorge von Montaigne bis Tieck. Paderborn: Fink, 2016.

Research project: Invisible Forces: Of Orbits, Ellipses, and the Occult in 17th-Century Europe

The concept of “force” is said to mark a turning point in the history of the sciences, from Kepler's first “mechanical” reinterpretations of a solar soul (anima) to a solar force (vis) to Newton's law of gravitation. At the same time, however, the new “mechanical force” was still regarded in Newton's time as the movens of an occult force that was related to that of a hidden God. The starting point of the project, which I will be working on as a fellow of the CAS “Imaginarien der Kraft,” is therefore the attempt to re-examine this historical shift with regard to the different concepts of “force” (dunamis, vis, potentia, energeia) as they were used before Newton not only by Kepler, but also, among many others, by William Gilbert, Athanasius Kircher and Margaret Cavendish, in their different ways of rethinking the dynamics between matter and form. In doing so, I will first look at the relationship between the elliptical orbit model and the new solar vis, which Kepler conceived of as both “corporeal and immaterial,” in order to then explore the connections to coeval ideas of virtus in medicine and the imaginaries of the vis dicendi and energeia as efficacia in rhetoric, which underwent their own changes in the 16th and 17th centuries.