Gabriel Trop

Gabriel Trop
Associate Professor of German; Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature; Director of Graduate Studies

Education

Ph.D., German and Medieval Studies, University of California at Berkeley
18th-Century Studies; Poetry and Poetics; Romanticism; Philosophy and Aesthetics

Intellectual Biography & Awards

My research interests tend to focus on the relationship between poetic practices and aesthetic discourses, both broadly conceived. My general scholarly activity within this broader framework is rather comparative; in both my teaching and research, I have engaged with texts from Ancient Greece, Roman Antiquity, the Middle Ages (mainly Middle High German), and German and French literature and philosophy from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in literature and art as imaginative practices of selfhood, and am currently working on a project that investigates the relation between poetry and the philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) in German Idealism.

Recent Publications

• “Goethe and German Idealism.” Forthcoming in Charlotte Lee (ed.), Goethe in Context, Cambridge University Press.
• “[Poststructuralists] Reading Hölderlin.” Forthcoming in Tilottama Rajan and Daniel Whistler (eds.), Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism.
• “Hemsterhuis and Provocation: The German Reception of his Early Writings.” In François Hemsterhuis, Early Writings, 1762-1773, ed. and trans. Jacob van Sluis and Daniel Whistler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022).
• “Individuation and Disindividuation in Karolina von Güderrode’s Aesthetics of Naturphilosophie.” Symphilosophie 3 (2021), pp. 165-189
• “Spinoza and the Genesis of the Aesthetic.” Aesthetic Investigations 4.2 (2021): 182-200.
• “Kraft (Force).” Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts. Link. 2021.
• “Invisibility and Indexicality: Reflections on the Aesthetics and Politics of Schiller’s Theater.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory. 95.4: 2021. 257-277.

Frequently Taught Courses

• GERM 68: Intensity, Vitality, Ecstasy
• GERM 281: Freedom and Terror
• GERM 301: Conversation and Composition
• GERM 303: Introduction to German Literature
• GERM 370: German Intellectual History

Undergraduate and Graduate Advising and Mentoring

Honors Theses:

• Alexandra Talbert (Honors, 2015)
• Gregory Smith (Highest Honors, 2012)

Ph.D. Dissertation Advising:

• Martin Dawson (in progress)
• John Gill (in progress)
• Amy Jones (in progress)
• Lukas Hofmann (in progress)
• Tako Takamura (co-advising with Prof. Stefani Engelstein, in progress)

Independent Studies in German Romanticism and Continental Philosophy.

Additional Information

For more about Dr. Trop, see his Curriculum Vitae.