About

Jason Groves is an Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Washington and serves as the Undergraduate Programs Coordinator. His research focuses on geology and the broader concept of the imperiled earth as a contested site of relations mediated through the literary and visual arts. His first monograph, The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary, published by Fordham University Press in 2020, traces the withdrawal of the earth as a reliable setting and stable point of reference in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. He is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Fugitive Relations: Remembering the Holocaust in the Anthropocene, which extends his interests into Jewish studies and memory studies. Groves has contributed to edited volumes and essays that explore the intersections of geology, race, and memory, including analyses of Celan's poetry and Adalbert Stifter's work. His collaborations at the University of Washington include supporting interdisciplinary research clusters on the Anthropocene and relational memory, with active engagement in public scholarship and translation practices. His work also encompasses community-based translation projects related to the Holocaust and environmental humanities, as well as collaborations with the artist collective Futurefarmers. Groves maintains an active research profile with publications in the Germanic Review and has advised doctoral students in related fields.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Epistemology
• Art history
• Law
• Geology
• Linguistics
• Paleontology

Selected publications

• The Field of Writing: The Ambulatory Art of Noticing Third Nature in Sebald and Kinsky

  2025-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• A Critique of Purity in Ethics and Religion

  Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Jonathan Haidt has argued that contemporary philosophy has focused primarily on the ethics of harm/care and fairness/cheating. In his Moral Foundations Theory he argues that this is too constricted a view of morality, and that there are additional modules for loyalty/betrayal module, authority/respect module, liberty/oppression, and purity/sanctity. While Haidt makes a good case for the existence of these extra modules, he does not make a case for treating these modules as philosophically defensible. In this paper, I argue that the purity/sanctity module is particularly problematic. I will argue that the concept of purity has no defensible role in morality and by extension, religion. After making the moral argument I will turn to the instantiation of purity in Judaism and Hinduism, and show that most uses of purity in these religions are pernicious and that they should be “purified of purity.” I will build on Joshua Greene’s argument that morality evolves not to produce universal morality, but always a tribal morality.. Religion functions the same way, evolving to benefit the tribe by facilitating cooperation and avoiding free riders. Purity, like sacrifice, in this view had an evolutionary function at one time, but we no longer need purity for its evolutionary reasons-to facilitate cooperation and deter free riders.

  PublisherDOI

• Crossing Disciplines and the Role of Knowledge Circulation for the Emergence of New Interdisciplinary Fields

  2023-06-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Our chapter looks at the role of knowledge circulation for the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields. Taking the new field of Environmental Humanities as our test case, we first trace its institutional and international development. Secondly, we analyse the media, channels and areas involved in the diffusion of central ideas connected to the field. In this context, new platforms of scholarly exchange have developed, such as journals, institutions, websites, etc. As we show, interdisciplinarity and interculturality become increasingly important as the world faces unprecedented challenges, like climate change, demanding new synthetic outlooks, analytical tools and competences from researchers that enhance reflexivity. New interdisciplinary fields also require the redefinition of disciplines (moral principles, values), which can only be brought about by drawing on a plurality of knowledge, representations and sociocultural issues.

  PublisherDOI

• Indianization in Indonesia

  Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We typically think of globalization as a modern phenomenon, but globalization in more modest forms occurs much earlier in history. The spread of Greek culture into the Mediterranean and later Europe is one case. The Indianization of Southeast Asia is another, and we can learn from these earlier cases. Just as modern globalization is a mixed economic and cultural phenomenon, so was the Indianization of Indonesia. In this paper I will examine the intersection of trade, religion and art as Indian culture enters Indonesia in the early centuries of the first millennia.

  PublisherDOI

• Reading Celan Today

  The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory · 2023 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • History

  The recent venerations of Paul Celan on the occasion of his centenary invite further reflection on how his poems reach across time. As immersed as they are in their own here and now, Celan's poems demonstrate a remarkable capacity to touch on others' histories and experiences and to be touched by them in turn. Drawing on the elaborations of touch in transnational German studies, and the ways in which touch apprehends relations that fall outside of the purview of comparison, opposition, reception, and encounter, this introduction sketches out a framework for appreciating the connections that his poetry facilitates. The essays that follow offer connective readings of Celan that range from the 13th-century Anatolian mystic Yunus Emre to the contemporary American poet

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Low Tide, Black Shoals: Toward Offshore Formations in Celan Studies

  The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory · 2023-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While Paul Celan’s lyrical commemoration of the Holocaust has been recognized for its multidirectionality, commentators have not acknowledged his engagement with other colonial and imperial histories contemporaneous with his writing. Celan’s advocacy for reading words “with the acute accent of the present” calls for a reading of his poetry that is attentive to its evocations of, and silence around, multiple histories of racial violence. Recognizing how the longue durée of transatlantic slavery is mediated through oceanic archives and the element of water, this article reads the fraught nearshore landscapes in Sprachgitter for their commemoration of the unresolved unfolding of Auschwitz and, if inadvertently, the unresolved unfolding of the Middle Passage. The reading focuses on “Niedrigwasser,” a poem ostensibly about a coastal landscape that is also about the formation and deformation of that landscape through ecological processes that used materials transported by genocidal violence. The multiple temporalities of the poem move between human time and geologic time in order to grasp the legacy of Auschwitz. In unsettling attempts to contain the spatial and temporal scale of genocide, this and other poems evidence their receptivity to and implicatedness in distant, but not entirely unrelated, histories of violence.

  PublisherDOI

• The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • History
  • Literature

  The Dynastic Imagination is a pathbreaking, polyphonic intellectual history of modern dynastic and antidynastic thought. Ranging from the French Revolution to the aftermath of World War I (with an epilogue on the aftermath of World War II), this broad yet highly focused study shows how questions of inheritance and legitimacy underwrite many major intellectual movements, from Romanticism to naturalism to feminism and psychoanalysis.In the nineteenth century bourgeois writers in Germany were imagining and reimagining broad structures of kinship. But menacingly, they saw the imagination itself, among other aspects of human experience, as something impersonal and deeply informed—if not formed outright—by one’s ancestors. There is a brooding ambivalence to “the dynastic imagination” that Adrian Daub deftly negotiates: namely, individuals’ imagination of the ancestral and the imagination that is itself ancestral, or transindividual. While this book dwells primarily in and around the nuclear family, already the opening essay, “Mediate Family,” plumbs the inhuman depths of the dynastic imagination—which “geologizes the family” (4)—insofar as it constitutes “that part of our familial past that not only is inaccessible to us but also makes us realize how inaccessible even our immediate familial environs can be” (5). Anachrony and anachronism are constant companions in the fictions, philosophies, and case studies that follow.Dynastic is almost a misnomer for us moderns, who associate the term with the aristocracy and who have had the dynastic imagination in this sense bred out of us. Against an outmoded opposition between the nuclear and the dynastic, however, Daub’s concept of “the dynastic family” accounts for a wide variety of familial forms invoked by bourgeois writers to account for the intergenerational transmission of things besides financial assets and political power. More than a monarchical concept, then, the dynasty emerges in these pages as “an epistemic order,” or “a way of conceptualizing temporality and historical causality” (10–11). And The Dynastic Imagination is at its most exciting when it explores nonlinear and nonbiological modes of causality and transmission “beyond paternity, beyond primogeniture, beyond heredity,” which, admittedly, is most of the time (204). The book is a study of the logical family more than of the biological family, or rather, the logical family that extends throughout and augments every biological family. Accordingly, the dynastic emerges as a key figure of queer kinship in modernity. While the final chapter, “Georg, or The Queer Dynasty,” is the only one to focus on an avowedly homosocial community, the entire study exemplifies, and indeed facilitates, a queer orientation toward family. As Daub concludes in a reading of Heinrich Böll’s story “Die schwarzen Schafe” (“Black Sheep,” 1951), “There’s no heteronormative family without its queer shadow” (210).These readings of the queerness of dynastic transmission—in and around Hegel, Goethe, Wagner, and Freud, to name just a few of Daub’s illustrious subjects—are as astonishing as they are compelling. The shortcomings of the nuclear family and nuclearity in nineteenth-century German literature have rarely been rendered as engrossingly as they are in this study. The same could be said of the dynastic imagination. Nineteenth-century German literature has rarely seemed this consequential for modern intellectual history, which I particularly appreciate as someone professionally and personally invested in the German literature of this period. This study’s achievement is in part due to the breadth of material that Daub has at his command. Chapter 1 is something of an outlier in that it traverses the entire nineteenth century as it tracks shifting attitudes toward dynasty in the trope of the paterfamilias brooding in a family gallery. However, the number of figures in the ancestral gallery of German studies that Daub summons in this chapter—Ludwig Uhland, Franz Grillparzer, Goethe, Annette von Droste-Hühlshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Gustav Freytag—is typical of the other chapters. Just as the writers in Daub’s study explore how the immediate family is constituted by what seems peripheral to it, so the individual chapters situate their single authors within wider relations. For example, chapter 3, “Abortive Romanticism,” the longest chapter, brings together Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Shelling, Goethe, and Mary Shelley as they contend with the limits of vitalism and organicism and hence with the limits of Romanticism. As much as this is a study of family and modernity in nineteenth-century Germany, and as much as these questions are peculiarly German, the disruption of genealogical structures introduced by the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848 have methodological implications that Daub, as a comparatist, is well poised to pursue. Chapter 6, “Naturalism, or The Dynastic Romance,” for example, focuses largely on Émile Zola but in ways that lead to novel readings in this and later chapters of Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Mann.No study of family and modernity in Germany could entirely bypass Freud, and the chapter devoted to Freud, Carl Jung, and Léopold Szondi shows how psychoanalysis developed in tandem with concerns over its own transmission and transmissibility as an institution. In exploring these dynamics, Daub offers perhaps as illuminating an overview of the tension between familial and ancestral accounts of psychic life as is possible in twenty pages. I found that most chapters, this one included, can stand alone as absorbing intellectual histories of major moments in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European thought. But just as an insistence on intergenerational perspectives and formations crops up even in those authors most adamant about the primacy of the immediate family, so too are these chapters best read in concert, from opening to close, even as the anachronisms of the ancestral imagination complicate any straightforward chronology.While The Dynastic Imagination traces the resurgence of the renegade intergenerational perspectives of the nineteenth century as far forward as 1968, the dilemma of a disavowed past that is not past is still with us. The recent reopening of the reconstructed Berlin Palace (a former residence of the House of Hohenzollern) and the overwhelmingly critical response to the colonial collections it houses in the Humboldt Forum demonstrate the persistence of the dynastic imagination and the timeliness of The Dynastic Imagination. The moving words that close the book—a reflection in the acknowledgments on “the great spectral dynasty of the dead that clusters around the small, precious nucleus of the living” (219)—are also a fitting description of the contemporary return of repressed colonial histories, whether in Germany or in North America. Contemporary debates over matters of legacy and inheritance for colonial crimes extend well beyond direct familial beneficiaries, and in this they go to the heart of the issues raised by this important book.

  PublisherDOI

• Timothy Attanucci: <i>The Restorative Poetics of a Geological Age: Stifter, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Aesthetic Practices of Geohistoricism</i>. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. 228 pp.

  Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies · 2022-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Article Timothy Attanucci: The Restorative Poetics of a Geological Age: Stifter, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Aesthetic Practices of Geohistoricism. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. 228 pp. was published on June 1, 2022 in the journal arcadia (volume 57, issue 1).

  PublisherDOI

• Langsame Katastrophen. Eine Poetik der Erdgeschichte

  The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory · 2022-01-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Weitzman, Erica. <i>At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter</i>

  The German Quarterly · 2021-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Natalie Lozinski-Veach

  4 shared

• Philippe Hamman

  1 shared

• Christopher Schliephake

  1 shared

Labs

• German StudiesPI

Awards & honors

• McLean Prize for Excellence in German