Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus

Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus teaches German literature at the University of Potsdam, having spent twenty-two years as Scientific Coordinator at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research and teaching interests are in literature and performance within a large cultural, media, scholarly, and socio-political context. He is currently finishing a book on the art of declamation (“Literarische Vortragskunst”) from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. His thesis is that the performance of literature through reading aloud, declamation, and recitation by different agents (including authors, actors and professional reciters, schoolteachers, and lay people) has been an important part of German-speaking literary life since the Enlightenment.