Ulrike Wagner

Ulrike Wagner received her PhD in German and comparative literature from Columbia University and is director of German Studies at Bard College Berlin. Her research focuses on European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism.

She recently completed Transcendental Philology: Emerson, Fuller, Nietzsche, and the Migrations of a Method, a monograph that traces how philological practice in transatlantic contexts and beyond the university redefined the humanities as a force for educational freedom and democratic participation. The book shows how Emerson, Fuller, Herder, Schleiermacher, de Staël, Nietzsche, and their interlocutors turned writing, translating, reading, and discussion into living methods for asking what humanistic scholarship is for, how it shapes individual lives, and how it transforms ordinary experience across gendered and institutional boundaries.

During her residency, she will pursue a related project on women writers—including Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bettine von Arnim, Rahel Varnhagen, and their circles—tracing how their philological and philosophical work created public forms of intellectual authority outside the academy and why those strategies continue to matter for contemporary debates about education and public access.