Dr. Jan Niklas Howe

Jan Niklas Howe studied Comparative Literature, German Literature, and Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Université Paris 8 and Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD from the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies in Berlin, with a dissertation on monstrosities in 19th century literature and sciences. After the completion of his PhD, he taught as an Assistant Professor for Comparative Literature at the Peter Szondi Institute in Berlin. He was a Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. Since 2017, he has directed the “Creativity and Genius” Junior Research Group at LMU Munich. He is currently working on a book addressing the relation between 18th-century aesthetics of genius and 20th- and 21st-century models of creative subjectivity. His research interests include the operating modes of aesthetic superlatives, transfers of aesthetic paradigms to non-aesthetic fields of social inquiry, the history of rhetorics and poetics, theories of the weird and the fantastic, the cultural history of personal drive and the interrelation of literature and self-fashioning.