Work
I am a Professor of Transnational American Studies (Political Theory, Aesthetics and Public Humanities) at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. My institutional website is available here.
Previously, I taught Philosophy at the University of Potsdam, Comparative Literature at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, and American Literature at the University of Göttingen.
I studied English and History at the Humboldt University of Berlin and have held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard University, Brown University, the University of Oxford, King’s College London, and New York University. I was born in Lausanne, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I write in English, German and, somewhat less frequently, French.
Since 2020, I have been the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project "The Arts of Autonomy: Pamphleteering, Popular Philology, and the Public Sphere, 1988–2018”. My team and I study how ordinary readers use polemical literature (pamphlets, open letters, manifestos) to achieve political ends. We also edit an anthology of polemical literature accessible here.
My research mainly revolves around the intersection of aesthetic forms and political theory, with a particular interest in current configurations of Liberal culture. I write about American, French, and German literature and philosophy, with occasional forays into classical Chinese philosophy.
Mercado Municipal (São Paulo, Brazil), January 2017, Author: Wilfredor. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Contact
The photograph on the left was taken by Orli Baruch in 2022 at a friend’s place.
I am not on social media.
My institutional website at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich can be accessed here.
The website of my European Research Council project “The Arts of Autonomy” can be accessed here.
For all professional enquiries, please contact me at: p.monot@lmu.de
Selected Publications
“Robopathen und Robopathinnen aller Länder… Wenn die KI die Drehbücher schreibt”, in Merkur, 891 (August 2023), p. 84–98.
“墨子 The Book of Mozi. Chapter 39: Against the Confucians (Fei Ru Xia)”, The Arts of Autonomy: A Living Anthology of Polemical Literature, 2023. <Link>
“Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Contemporary Technological Pamphleteering, Popular Literacy, and the Politics of Literary Circulation”, in: Michael Gamper, Jutta Müller-Tamm, David Wachter, Jasmin Wrobel (eds.), The Value of Literary Circulation / Der Wert der literarischen Zirkulation, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2023, 173–185. <Link>
“A Feminist Server 0.01: A Commented Bilingual Edition with Contextual Sources”, in The Arts of Autonomy: A Living Anthology of Polemical Literature, ed. Pierre-Héli Monot, Munich: The Arts of Autonomy, 2022. <Link>
“Kill Lists: Ideas of Order in the Pamphlet”, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, Blog, Series “Die Macht der Listen” 2022. <Link>
“On Neoclassicism: Theatrocracy, the 1%, and the Democratic Paradox, from Sophocles to Occupy Wall Street”, American Dramaturgies for the 21st Century, ed. Julie Vatain-Corfdir, Paris: Sorbonne University Press, 2022, 201-216.
“Maximalist Expectations in an Age of Anti-Populism”, in: Common Grounds? Transatlantic Perspectives on the State of American Democracy, ed. Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, Boris Vormann, Special Issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2022, 215-221. <Link>
“Is All Discourse Official? On the Poetics of Gifting and Gossiping”, in: Contagion and Conviction: Rumor and Gossip in American Culture, ed. Pierre-Héli Monot and Florian Zappe, Special Issue of the European Journal of American Studies, 15/4, 2020 (2021).
“Können Maschinen frei sein? Grundzüge einer künstlichen Autonomie” in: Verheißungen der Autonomie, ed. Pierre-Héli Monot und Christina Globke, Schriftenreihe der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz. Vol. 5. Mainz. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2020. 11-24.
“Armut als Kapital: Eine Kritik an Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis und Geoffroy de Lagasnerie”, in: Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte: Zeitschrift für historische Studien, 2020, vol. 2, special issue: “Arbeit und Literatur”, ed. David Bebnoswki, 123-133.
“Possibilities, Responsibilities: On Poetic Genres and Political Poiesis”, in: Poem Unlimited: New Perspectives on Poetry and Genre, Anglia, Volume 63, ed. David Kerler, Timo Müller, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019, 99-113.
“仁 / rén”, in: Loanwords to Live With: An Ecotopian Lexicon Against the Anthropocene, ed. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Chantal Bilodeau, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 226-236.
“Poetik des Macronismus: Michel Houellebecqs Serotonin” [“The Poetics of Macronism: Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin], Merkur (Blog), January 16, 2019.
“La Lumière, la Vie, la Lettre et Le Pain: de l’Eucharistie à la Découverte de la Faim” [“Light, Life, Letter, and Loaf: From the Eucharist to the Discovery of Hunger”], in: La Littérature et la Vie, ed. Christophe Ippolito, Collection Perspectives Comparatistes, vol. 351, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018, 51-67.
“The One, the Many and the Few: A Philological Problem and its Political Form”, in: SPELL, vol. 35, Special Issue: American Communities: Between the Popular and the Political, ed. Lukas Etter, Julia Straub, Tübingen: Narr, 2017, 85-103.
Selected Conference Papers
MLA Annual Convention 2024, Philadelphia
“Paratexts After Paper”
Conference Paper, January 2024
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
“Why Write? Literature and Political Agency: Ten Theses”
Guest Lecture, May 2023
Université Paris-Sorbonne
“Gray Material: Universalism, Particularism, and Their Literary Forms”, March 2023
University of Chicago
“Political Hypocrisy: Surrealism and the Aesthetics of Moral Rectitude”
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), March 2023
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
“Selbstermächtigungen: Poesie und Politik des Pamphlets”
Guest Lecture, with David Bebnowski, November 2022
Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen
“Abschusslisten: Über ein Ordnungsprinzip polemischer Literatur”
November 2022
Universität Tübingen
“Why Philology? An Introduction”, June 2022
Forum Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte
Round table with Patrick Eiden-Offe and Anke Stelling. Presentation of the Special Issue “Arbeit und Literatur” of the journal Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte, April 2021
MLA Annual Convention 2020, Seattle
“The Nature of Interpretation and the Nature of the Real”, January 2021
Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz
“Will Machines Ever Be Free?”, November 2019
King’s College London
“Automata and Autonomy: Is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile a Turing Test?”, October 2018
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
“American Wanderlust: Alexander von Humboldt, Henry David Thoreau, and American Landscape Painting” with Prof. Dr. Margit Kern and Dr. Amrei Buchholz, August 2018
Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam
“Has Modernism Become Geopolitical?”, Modernist Studies Association, August 2017
University of Oxford
“The Poetics of Democratic Self-Limitation”, May 2017