Alexander von Humboldt

Oliver Lubrich, born in Berlin in 1970, studied literature in Berlin, Berkeley, and Saint-Étienne. He was a Junior Professor of Rhetoric at the Free University of Berlin and a visiting professor in Chicago, Long Beach, São Paulo, and Monterrey. He has been Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bern since 2011. He published monographs on Shakespeare’s Self-Deconstruction, Postcolonial Poetics, and Alexander von Humboldt. He edited numerous works by Humboldt, including Views of the Cordilleras, Central Asia, and Cosmos. He is researching testimonies written by notable figures who wrote about or from within Nazi Germany, for example, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. He edited John F. Kennedy’s “Hidden Diary” from 1937 and the German novellas by Thomas Wolfe, as well as the collections Travels in the Reich (1933–1945) and Reports from the Target Zone (1939–1945). With neuroscientists, he conducted studies in experimental rhetoric. With primatologists and ethnologists, he investigated the role of affects in field research.

Thomas Nehrlich, born in Berlin in 1984, studied literature in Berlin and Paris. He was a research assistant at the Free University of Berlin and a guest lecturer at California State University Long Beach. He has been teaching at the University of Bern since 2011. He is the author of monographs on punctuation and typography in the prose of Heinrich von Kleist (2012) and on the writings of Alexander von Humboldt and their contribution to the history of science (2021). As a specialist in critical editing, he is the editor of numerous works by Kleist and Humboldt, as well as William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei. He explored the intersection between literature and book history in theoretical studies on typography and through the novels of Jonathan Safran Foer. Focusing on the social significance of heroism, he published an anthology on the history and theory of superheroes and is currently researching the evolution of post-heroism.