About

Barbara Nagel is an Associate Professor in the Princeton German Department with a focus on the relation between rhetoric and affect. Her research and teaching interests include gender and sexuality, theology, psychoanalysis, law with a historical focus on the Baroque, literature around 1800, and realism. She joined Princeton University in 2014, having previously been a wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Nagel studied comparative literature and history at the Free University Berlin and earned her Ph.D. from New York University in 2012. Her scholarly work includes the publication of her first book, 'Der Skandal des Literalen. Barocke Literalisierungen in Gryphius, Kleist, Büchner,' in 2012, and an edited collection titled 'Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction' in 2015. Her other notable publications include 'Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, and Domestic Violence,' published in 2019, which received positive reviews in several academic journals. She is currently working on a third book, 'The Mighty Hater: The Metaphysics of Rage in Martin Luther’s Rhetoric,' which is under peer review, and a new project tentatively titled 'Castration, Counterpower, Care: Feminist Readings.' Barbara Nagel has published in venues such as Critical Inquiry, Public Books, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Law and Literature, Feminist German Studies, and New German Critique. Her research topics include rape and legal fiction in Tacitus, slut-shaming metaphors in Goethe, gendered editorial violence in Stifter, toxic masculinity in translations of Kleist, pedophilia in Schwarzenbach, and anti-blackness in Özdamar. She was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin in fall 2022 and has received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. Nagel held a Robert Remsen Laidlaw ‘04 University Preceptorship from 2018 to 2021 and has received an Excellence in Teaching Award from Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. She serves on the PMLA Advisory Committee and the advisory board for Cornell University’s book series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought. At Princeton, she is an Associate Faculty member of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Since 2018, she has served as Faculty Advisor for Butler College.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Art
• Philosophy
• Law
• Psychoanalysis
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Humanities
• Linguistics
• History
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Visual arts
• Medicine
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• Literature

Selected publications

• Anti‐Blackness, Canonicity, and (Mis‐)Identification in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's <i>Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum</i>

  The German Quarterly · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay explores the disturbing presence of anti‐Black language and tropes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's recent, celebrated novel Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum . Drawing on Toni Morrison's classic analysis in Playing in the Dark , I argue Özdamar's anti‐Blackness is characterized by a double‐valence: on one hand, Özdamar's anti‐Blackness partakes of the racializing clichés anatomized by Morrison and stakes a claim to whiteness and canonicity on their basis; on the other, this anti‐Blackness is continuous with a tendency towards racialized self‐mockery in the whole of Özdamar's oeuvre, as if Özdamar imagined these scenes to be produced from within Blackness and/or as a gesture of minoritarian solidarity. The text is structured by a problematic (mis‐)identification with Black abjection and a desire for whiteness. Özdamar thus participates in both an avant‐gardist tradition of transgression and a liberal logic of post‐raciality in which racializing tropes are free for unlimited literary appropriation.

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• The Child in the Dark: On Child Abuse in Robert Walser

  New German Critique · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  The attention that the Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser pays to domestic violence can be regarded as exceptional. So why does child abuse still remain a blind spot in the scholarship on Walser? This article discerns techniques that Walser uses to render family violence invisible, such as multiperspectivism and changes of tonality. These aesthetic techniques gain in depth through comparison to concepts from object relations theory: Sándor Ferenczi’s “identification with the aggressor” and Wilfred R. Bion’s “attacks on linking.” With family brutality, the problem of perspective is not purely formal but intrinsic, because part of the violence of domestic violence is the exhausting degree of affective mobility it demands—a capacity but also a vertiginous obligation to change tones and perspectives.

  PublisherDOI

• Flirtations

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-06-23

  book1st authorCorresponding

  What is flirtation, and how does it differ from seduction?In historical terms, the particular question of flirtation has tended to be obscured by that of seduction, which has understandably been a major preoccupation for twentieth-century thought and critical theory. Both the discourse and the critique of seduction are unified by their shared obsession with a very determinate end: power. In contrast, flirtation is the game in which no one seems to gain the upper hand and no one seems to surrender. The counter-concept of flirtation has thus stood quietly to the side, never quite achieving the same prominence as that of seduction. It is this elusive (and largely ignored) territory of playing for play’s sake that is the subject of this anthology.The essays in this volume address the under-theorized terrain of flirtation not as a subgenre of seduction but rather as a phenomenon in its own right. Drawing on the interdisciplinary history of scholarship on flirtation even as it re-approaches the question from a distinctly aesthetic and literary-theoretical point of view, the contributors to Flirtations thus give an account of the practice of flirtation and of the figure of the flirt, taking up the act’s relationship to issues of mimesis, poetic ambiguity, and aesthetic pleasure. The art of this poetic playfulness—often read or misread as flirtation’s "empty gesture"—becomes suddenly legible as the wielding of a particular and subtle form of nonteleological power

  PublisherDOI

• Doing It as the Beasts Did: Intertextuality as Flirtation in Gradiva

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-09-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• INTERLUDE

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-09-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Versioning Violence

  Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie digital/Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie · 2020-06-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CONTENTS

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-09-04

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Applikation des Design Thinking Ansatzes auf den Flugzeugkabinen Entwurfsprozess

  2020 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Political Science

  Im Entwurf innovativer Flugzeugkabinenkonzepte für die Zukunft zählt die Passagierakzeptanz zu den wichtigsten Kriterien für Hersteller, Fluggesellschaften und Forschungseinrichtungen. Im Zuge wachsender Passagierzahlen sowie weltweiter gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen besteht die zentrale Herausforderung darin, dass sich veränderte Anforderungsprofil eines künftigen Nutzerspektrums bereits im frühen Entwurfsstadium zu identifizieren und in den Entwurfsprozess zu übertragen. Im Zuge dessen zeigen nutzerorientierte Entwurfsansätze wie die Design Thinking Methode ein hohes Potential, was die stetig wachsende Popularität in industriellen Anwendungsfällen aus den Bereichen der Konsumgüter und der Automobilindustrie unterstreicht. In diesem Paper wird die Applikation der Design Thinking Methode auf den Kabinenentwurfsprozess vorgestellt. Als Basis für ein Praxisbeispiel wird die Nutzergruppe beruflich-reisender Fluggäste mithilfe einer Persona Definition identifiziert und für den nutzerorientierten Kabinenentwurf verwendet. Einen weiteren Baustein bildet der Ideen- und Prototypen-Entwurfsprozess mittels digitaler Design- und Modellierungsanwendungen. Ein iterativer Bewertungs- und Anpassungsprozess erfolgt dabei durch eine Konzeptentwurfsabbildung in der virtuellen Realität sowie einer agentenbasierten Passagierflusssimulation. Appliziert auf den Entwurfsprozess von Flugzeugkabinenkonzepten liefert der Design Thinking Ansatz eine zeit- und qualitätseffiziente Alternative zu bestehenden Design Methoden, was durch den digitalen Prototypen- und Bewertungsprozess im frühen Entwicklungsstadium gewährleistet wird. Zudem wird im Rahmen dieser Arbeit ein möglicher Ansatz zur Schließung der Lücke zwischen der technologisch komplexen Umgebung einer Flugzeugkabine und den sich ändernden Bedürfnissen des zukünftigen Passagiers skizziert.

  OA PDFDOI

• Frontmatter

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-09-04

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Goethe’s Stalker Snails

  Feminist German Studies · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Art

  “Crab and snail are both rare creatures to me,” reads an epigram by Goethe. This article takes the subjective character of the epigram as a point of departure to investigate the curious insistence of snail figures throughout Goethe’s oeuvre, with particular attention to their flexibility, reversibility, and ultimate incoherence. This incoherence has to do with the versatility of the snail as an asexual, trans, queer, but for Goethe, above all, female figure of victimhood (the persecuted maiden, the debauched lover), which in turn triggers feelings of persecution in the libertine. Yet, when Goethe himself is confronted with the female libertine Mme de Staël, he draws on metaphors of snail seclusion to express his own desire for autonomy as well as protection. The encounter between de Staël and Goethe presents an exemplary attempt of hegemonic masculinity to hijack victimhood and to treat it as the last coveted privilege patriarchy lacks.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz

  6 shared

• Lauren Shizuko Stone

  5 shared

• Gianluca Solla

  3 shared

• Judith D. Kasper

  Johns Hopkins University

  3 shared

• Davide Caliaro

  2 shared

• Michael Auer

  2 shared

• Cornelia Wild

  2 shared

• Robert Stockhammer

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Humboldt Research Fellowship (2022)
• Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin
• Robert Remsen Laidlaw ‘04 University Preceptorship (2018-202…
• Excellence in Teaching Award from the School of Engineering…