Tobias Wilke
Tobias Wilke
Assistant Professor of German
Education
Ph.D., German Literature, Princeton University
Dr. phil,, Neuere deutsche Literatur, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Intellectual Biography
I am a literary and media historian who trained in Germany and the US. After completing a bi-national doctoral degree (co-tutelle) at Princeton University (Ph.D.) and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Dr. phil.), I held academic positions at Columbia University and the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin. Additionally, I have been a NOMIS fellow at eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the Universität Basel, a visiting professor and project leader in the Research Cluster Languages of Emotion at the Freie Universität Berlin, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the ZfL. I joined the faculty at UNC in the fall of 2024.
My research and teaching centers on European modernism and the historical avant-garde movements, media history and media theory from the 19th through the 21st century, literature and the history of science, sound studies, and digital theory.
I am the author of three books: Sound Writing: Experimental Modernism and the Poetics of Articulation (The University of Chicago Press, 2022); Medien der Unmittelbarkeit: Dingkonzepte und Wahrnehmungstechniken 1918-1939 (Fink, 2010); and Einführung in die Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 3rd ed. 2016; co-authored with Dorothee Kimmich). I have also co-edited a number of special issues and essay collections, including a special issue of Grey Room on Walter Benjamin (2010) and a special issue of The Germanic Review (2016) on “Dada 1916/2016.”
Currently, I am completing a new book project on digital “language models” in the 20th century that examines interconnections between Structuralist linguistics, information theory, Concrete Poetry, and early computer-based media art.
Recent Publications
Books
Sound Writing: Experimental Modernism and the Poetics of Articulation, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 272 pp.
Einführung in die Literatur der Jahrhundertwende, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 3rd ed. 2016 (co-authored with Dorothee Kimmich). 160 pp. [pdf available here]
Medien der Unmittelbarkeit: Dingkonzepte und Wahrnehmungstechniken 1918-1939, Munich: Fink, 2010. 260 pp.
Edited Volumes and Special Issues
The Germanic Review 91:4 (Winter 2016), Special Issue “Dada 1916/2016,” 100 pp. (co-edited with Nicola Behrmann)
Gefühl und Genauigkeit: Empirische Ästhetik um 1900, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 213 pp. (co-edited with Jutta Müller-Tamm and Henning Schmidgen)
Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010), Special Issue “Walter Benjamin’s Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art,” 113 pp. (co-edited with Michael Jennings)
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“Literatur im frühen Informationszeitalter,” in Handbuch Literatur & Technik, eds. Bernhard Dotzler, Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Berlin: deGruyter, 2025, 15 pp. [forthcoming]
“Information and the Object of Poetry: Verbi-voco-visual Explorations between McLuhan and Bense,” Culture, Theory and Critique 65 (2024), Special Issue: “Information Aesthetics,” 20 pp. [forthcoming]
“Sprechgedichte im Computer: Ernst Jandls ‘bestiarium’ als digitale Medienkunst,” in Nach der Stimme: Simulationen vokaler Authentizität. Mosse-Lectures 2022/23, Berlin: Vorwerk, 2024, 20 pp. [forthcoming]
“Konkrete Texte/diskrete Zeichen: Poetische Einsätze digitaler Schreibverfahren in den 1960er Jahren,” in Wie postdigital schreiben? Neue Verfahren der Gegenwartsliteratur, eds. Hanna Hamel, Eva Stubenrauch, Bielefeld: transcript, 2023, pp. 95-125.
“Sekundenstil,” in Enzyklopädie der Genauigkeit, eds. Markus Krajewski, Antonia von Schöning, Mario Wimmer, Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2021, pp. 434-443.