PD Dr. Tim Sommer

Senior Lecturer

Department of English and American Studies

English Literature and Culture

Office address:

Amalienstr. 83

Room 202

80799 Munich

Send an email

+49 (0)89 2180-3062

Office hours:

Monday, 4—5pm
Prior appointment via email required

Postal address:

Schellingstr. 3, RG

80799 Munich

CV

Academic Positions and Degrees

  • Since 2026: Privatdozent, University of Munich (LMU)
  • 2025: Habilitation, English Literature and Culture, University of Passau
  • Since 2024: Senior Lecturer, Department for English and American Studies, and Head of the Shakespeare Research Library, University of Munich
  • 2022–2024: Lecturer, English Literature and Culture, University of Passau
  • 2022: Lecturer, English Department, University of Heidelberg
  • 2020–2021: Lecturer, English Department, and Postdoctoral Associate, Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage, University of Heidelberg
  • 2017–2020: Adjunct Lecturer, English Department, and Member of the DFG Research Training Group “Authority and Trust,” Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg
  • 2019: Ph.D., English Literature, University of Heidelberg
  • 2016: M.A., English Studies (Literary Studies) / Modern German Literature, University of Heidelberg
  • 2014: B.A., English Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Studies / Musicology, University of Heidelberg
  • 2012–2013: Visiting Student, English Literature and Music, University of Edinburgh

Visiting Positions and Fellowships

  • Since 2026: Member of the Young Academy, Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz
  • 2025: Research Fellow in the Humanities, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
  • 2024: Junior Fellow, Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
  • 2023–2024: Humboldt Feodor Lynen Fellow and Academic Visitor, Faculty of English, University of Oxford
  • 2023–2024: Visiting Fellow, Exeter College, Oxford
  • 2022: Visiting Lecturer, Department of English, Université de Fribourg
  • 2021–2022: Visiting Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh
  • 2021–2022: Thyssen Fellow, English Department, University of Heidelberg
  • 2019: Academic Visitor, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
  • 2017: Visiting Fellow, Houghton Library, Harvard University
  • 2015: DAAD Promos Scholar, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
  • 2013: Heidelberg–Cambridge Exchange Scholar, King’s College, Cambridge

Publications

Monograph

Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

Reviews:

  • The Year’s Work in English Studies 103.1 (2024): 1050 (Rebecca White)
  • Victorian Studies 65.4 (2023): 651–53 (Rob Breton)
  • The Year’s Work in English Studies 102.1 (2023): 912–13 (William Baker)
  • American Literature 95.3 (2023): 604
  • Transatlantica 22.1 (2022) (Tom F. Wright)
  • Emerson Society Papers 33.2 (2022): 8–9 (Stephen Rachman)

Edited Books and Special Issues

  • Aktuelle Perspektiven der Romantikforschung: Theorien – Methoden – Lektüren. Berlin and Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, 2026. [co-edited with Frederike Middelhoff and Rahel Villinger] [forthcoming]
  • European Translations of Romanticism. Special Issue of European Romantic Review 37.1 (2026). [co-edited with Paul Hamann-Rose]
  • Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive: Objects, Institutions, and Practices between the Analogue and the Digital. New York and London: Routledge, 2025.
  • Institutions of Authorship: Publishing, Gatekeeping, and Patronage in the Modern Literary Field. Special Issue of Authorship 11.1 (2022). [co-edited with Philipp Löffler]
  • Transatlantic Literary Authority: Material Networks, Symbolic Economies. Special Issue of Symbiosis: Transatlantic Literary & Cultural Relations 25.1 (2021).

Journal Articles

  • “Englische Literatur und europäische Moderne: Ernst Robert Curtius’ Übersetzung von T. S. Eliots The Waste Land im Kontext von Zeitschriftenpublizistik und Intellektuellennetzwerken der Zwischenkriegsjahre.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 77.1 (2027). [forthcoming]
  • “Foreign Languages, Marginal Voices: Early Black Poetry and Prose in Dutch, English, French, German, and Russian Translation, 1770–1810.” European Romantic Review 37.1 (2026): 91–110.
  • “Introduction: European Translations of Romanticism.” European Romantic Review 37.1: 3–9 (2026). [co-authored with Paul Hamann-Rose]
  • “Between Private Collecting and Modern Philology: Henry James, Percy Shelley, and the Prehistory of Modern Literary Archiving.” Henry James Review 46.3 (2025): 290–97.
  • “Reading Traces: Shakespeare’s (Fake) Library, Book Ownership, and Historical Evidence.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 160 (2024): 104–19. [reprinted in Shakespeare Seminar 20 (2023): 3–15.]
  • “Romantic Objects, Victorian Collections: Scribal Relics and the Authorial Body.” Literature Compass 21.1–3 (2024).
  • “Diasporic Papers: Nobel Laureates and the Global Archive Economy.” Journal of World Literature 8.4 (2023): 500–19.
  • “Gleichgeschaltete Philologie: Anglistische Romantikforschung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 260.2 (2023): 310–26.
  • “Writers, Manuscripts, Collectors: Modern Authorship and the Fin-de-Siècle Origins of the Literary Archive.” Authorship 11.1 (2022).
  • “Introduction: Institutions of Authorship.” Authorship 11.1 (2022). [co-authored with Philipp Löffler]
  • “‘Far More Deeply Interfused’: ‘Tintern Abbey’ between Burkean and Kantian Sublimity.” Romanticism 28.1 (2022): 12–23.
  • “Vergehendes Erzählen: Philosophische, psychologische und narratologische Dimensionen des Zeitbegriffs in Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg.” German Quarterly 95.1 (2022): 19–37.
  • “Narratives of Contagion: Infectious Diseases and Literary Spatiality from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century.” Comparatio 13.2 (2021): 335–54. [co-authored with Erik Schilling]
  • “Embedded Authorship: Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nineteenth-Century ‘Transatlantic Bibliopoly.’” Book History 24.2 (2021): 352–80.
  • “Transatlantic Exchanges and the Shifting ‘Geography of the Word’: Two New Letters from Emerson to Carlyle.” New England Quarterly 94.2 (2021): 265–81.
  • “Cultural (Inter-)Nationalism: Orestes Brownson and the World Republic of Letters.” ESQ 67.1 (2021): 1–37.
  • “Material Exchange, Symbolic Recognition: Weltliteratur as Discourse and Practice in Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson.” Publications of the English Goethe Society 90.1 (2021): 53–71.
  • “Introduction: Transatlantic Literary Authority between the Material and the Symbolic.” Symbiosis: Transatlantic Literary & Cultural Relations 25.1 (2021): 7–20.
  • “Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival.” Anglia 138.3 (2020): 384–403.
  • “Canon, Corpus, Archive: Selection and Valuation from the Eighteenth Century to the Digital Humanities.” Anglistik 31.2 (2020): 53–68.
  • “Carlyle, Charles Robson, and the Printing of Latter-Day Pamphlets.” Notes and Queries 66.2 (2019): 296–300.
  • “Transatlantic Endorsement, Metatextual Patronage: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Review(s) of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution.” Carlyle Studies Annual 33 (2018/2019): 107–23.
  • “‘Always as a Means, Never as an End’: Orestes Brownson’s ‘Transcendentalist’ Criticism and the Uses of the Literary.” New England Quarterly 90.3 (2017): 442–72.
  • “Wordsworth’s Nineteenth-Century American Critics.” The Wordsworth Circle 48.3 (2017): 178–83.
  • “Deceptive Signification: Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, and Eighteenth-Century Hermit Discourse.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 64.4 (2016): 385–98.
  • “‘If It Were in My Power to Help You’: Victorian Literary Patronage in Four Unpublished Thomas Carlyle Letters.” Harvard Library Bulletin 27.3 (2016): 120–40.
  • “Economies of Value: Emerson, Thoreau, and the (Literary) Market.” Oxford Research in English 3 (2016): 42–53.

Book Chapters

  • “Gendered Professionalism and the Victorian Marketplace: Female Artists as Economic Agents in Anne Brontë’s Fiction.” Women, Money and Markets (1770–1914): Repre­senting the Invisible Hands of the Economy. Ed. Emma Newport and Joyce Goggin. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2026. 179–99. [forthcoming]
  • “Begriff, Epoche, Textkorpus: ‘Romantik’ als Problem literaturhistorischer Periodisie­rung zwischen Ideengeschichte und Digital Humanities.” Aktuelle Perspektiven der Romantikforschung: Theorien – Methoden – Lektüren. Ed. Frederike Middelhoff, Tim Sommer, and Rahel Villinger. Berlin and Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, 2026. 37–58. [forthcoming]
  • “Definitionen.” Aktuelle Perspektiven der Romantikforschung: Theorien – Methoden – Lektüren. Ed. Frederike Middelhoff, Tim Sommer, and Rahel Villinger. Berlin and Heidel­berg: J. B. Metzler, 2026. 27–35. [co-authored with Raphael Stübe] [forthcoming]
  • “Aktuelle Perspektiven der Romantikforschung: Zur Einführung.” Aktuelle Perspektiven der Romantikforschung: Theorien – Methoden – Lektüren. Ed. Frederike Middelhoff, Tim Sommer, and Rahel Villinger. Berlin and Heidel­berg: J. B. Metzler, 2026. 1–24. [co-authored with Frederike Middelhoff und Rahel Villinger] [forthcoming]
  • “Von der Bühne zum Buch: Shakespeares First Folio im Kontext der Theater- und Druckpraxis der Frühen Neuzeit.” making THEATRE: Wie Theater entsteht. Ed. Maren Richter and Dorothea Volz. Munich: Deutsches Theatermuseum, 2025. 24–28. [co-authored with Claudia Olk]
  • “Mediated Presence: Romantic Manuscripts and Modern Authorship.” Romanticism and Its Media. Ed. Ralf Haekel and Julia Heinemann. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2025. 11–23.
  • “Biographische, textuelle und materielle Migrationen (in) der Lyrik des Schwarzen Atlantiks.” Migrationen der Lyrik um 1300 und um 1800: DFG-Symposion 2023. Ed. Susanne Reichlin. Berlin and Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, 2025. 551–75.
  • “British Romantic Poetry and/as Cultural Heritage: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Robinson.” Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive: Objects, Institutions, and Practices between the Analogue and the Digital. Ed. Tim Sommer. New York and London: Routledge, 2025. 36–57.
  • “Introduction: Literature, Heritage, Archive.” Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive: Objects, Institutions, and Practices between the Analogue and the Digital. Ed. Tim Sommer. New York and London: Routledge, 2025. 1–17.
  • “Emerson and Carlyle: Race and (Anti-)Slavery.” The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Christopher Hanlon. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 192–207.
  • “Übersetzung, aemulatio, literarischer Kosmopolitismus: Britische und deutsche Shakespeare-Rezeption im späten achtzehnten und frühen neunzehnten Jahrhundert.” Die Shakespeare-Übersetzungen von August Wilhelm Schlegel und des Tieck-Kreises: Kontext – Geschichte – Edition. Ed. Claudia Bamberg, Christa Jansohn, and Stefan Knödler. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2023. 165–78.
  • “Paper Heritage: Cultural, Economic, and Institutional Dimensions of the Circulation of Modern Literary Manuscripts.” Der Wert der literarischen Zirkulation / The Value of Literary Circulation. Ed. Michael Gamper, Jutta Müller-Tamm, David Wachter, and Jasmin Wrobel. Berlin and Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, 2023. 403–16.
  • “Shakespeare zwischen Handschrift und Druck: Frühneuzeitliche Autorschaft und forensische Philologie.” Handschrift im Druck (ca. 1500–1800): Annotieren, Korrigieren, Weiterschreiben. Ed. Sylvia Brockstieger and Rebecca Hirt. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2023. 193–212.
  • “Authority, Genealogy, Infrastructure: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Transatlantic Relationality.” Authority and Trust in US Culture and Society: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Perspectives. Ed. Günter Leypoldt and Manfred Berg. Bielefeld: transcript, 2021. 223–44.
  • “Shakespearean Negotiations: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Ambiguities of Transatlantic Influence.” Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence. Ed. Paul E. Kerry, Albert D. Pionke, and Megan Dent. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018. 129–43.
  • “Charismatic Authorship: Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and the Nineteenth-Century Construction of Romantic Canonicity.” Reading the Canon: Literary History in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Philipp Löffler. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 363–85.

Reviews

  • Review of Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Heidi Weig, and Sebastian Graef (ed.), Cultures of Lecturing in the Long Nineteenth Century, Volume 1: Practices of Oral Performance in Manuals of Rhetoric, Journalism and Autobiography (Heidelberg: Winter, 2022) and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Sebastian Graef, and Heidi Weig (ed.), Cultures of Lecturing in the Long Nineteenth Century, Volume 2: Women and Public Speech in Manuals of Rhetoric, Journalism, Autobiography and Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2022). Journal for the Study of British Cultures 31.2 (2024): 307–11.
  • Review of Brecht de Groote, Thomas De Quincey: Romanticism in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). The Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 538–42.
  • Review of Katie McGettigan, The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). American Literary History 35.3 (2023): 1393–96.
  • Review of Philip Dickinson, Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Gestern | Romantik | Heute: Forum für Wissenschaft und Kultur, University of Jena (9 June 2021).
  • Review of Jonathan Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019). Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing News (25 February 2021).
  • Review of Kai Sina, Kollektivpoetik: Zu einer Literatur der offenen Gesellschaft in der Moderne mit Studien zu Goethe, Emerson, Whitman und Thomas Mann (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2019). PhiN: Philologie im Netz 90 (2020): 109–12.
  • Review of Stephanie Elizabeth Churms, Romanticism and Popular Magic: Poetry and Cultures of the Occult in the 1790s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). British Association for Romantic Studies Review 53 (2019): 9–10.
  • Review of Juliet Shields, Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765–1835 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67.4 (2019): 443–46.
  • Review of Ben Hewitt, Byron, Shelley, and Goethe’s ‘Faust’: An Epic Connection (Oxford: Legenda, 2015). Romanticism 23.2 (2017): 196–98.
  • Review of David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (ed.), A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2015). Emerson Society Papers 28.1 (2017): 9–10.

Blog Posts, Interviews, Reports, Shorter Contributions

  • “Forging Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century: The Confessions of William Henry Ireland.” “The Miscellany: The Munich Shakespeare Library Blog.” 21 November 2025.
  • “The Harvard Shelley Notebook.” Guest Contribution for the Online Research Project “Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition” (RÊVE) of the Network “European Romanticisms in Association.” Ed. Nicola J. Watson. 31 January 2024.
  • “Poetry in the British Atlantic.” Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. Ed. Trevor Burnard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
  • “Transatlantic Archives and Transatlantic Literary Studies.” Guest Contribution for the “Transatlantic Literary History: Notes | Essays | Documents” Blog. Ed. Kai Sina and Tanita Kraaz. 2 November 2020.
  • “The Art of the Quote: Trump, Social Media, and the Uses of Literary Reference.” Guest Contribution for the Heidelberg Center for American Studies Graduate Blog. 15 January 2020.
  • “Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scotts historischer Roman.” Interview for SWR2 Public Radio. 19 December 2019.
  • “New Horizons in the Trans/National Studies of Literature and Culture.” Conference Report, University of Gießen. KULT_online 48 (October 2016).

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