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Fellow Charlotte Lee
Fellow

Dr Charlotte Lee

Official Fellow; Director of Studies; Fellow in German

Website

The community at Murray Edwards is uniquely supportive. My colleagues have spared no energy in helping me to find opportunities for intellectual and professional development. I arrived in 2012 as a rather shy junior research fellow, and within three years had secured my dream job – a permanent lectureship. This, it seems to me, is symbolic of what the College aims to do for women of all ages, and it is exciting to be part of that endeavour

Degrees and honours

  • PhD (2013)
  • MPhil (2009)
  • BA French and German (2008)

All taken at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Biography

Charlotte's primary focus is German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on poetry. She is currently working on a study of the relationship between poetry and physical movement. The project looks at poetry in German, English and French.

Her publications include The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing (Legenda 2014), and she is also the editor of Goethe in Context (CUP 2024).

Charlotte welcomes enquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to her interests.

Research Interests

  • 18th and 19th-century German literature
  • Poetry and versification
  • Cognitive approaches to literature
  • Ageing / cultural gerontology

Authored work

  • Monograph

    The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing (Legenda, 2014).

     

    Edited volumes

    Goethe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

     

    German Life and Letters, vol. 70.4 (2017), special number: ‘Embodied Cognition around 1800’, co-edited with Katharina Engler-Coldren and Lore Knapp.  

     

    Edited Anthology

    German Romantic Poetry. Everyman's Library, Pocket Poets Series (Knopf, 2024).

     

    Essays and articles

    'Heine's Nordsee cycles and the Workings of the Imagination', in The German National Imagination from the Early Modern Period to the Present. Essays for Joachim Whaley, ed. by Charlotte Woodford, Anita Bunyan and Margarete Tiessen (Legenda, 2025).

     

    Daikoku, T., Lee, C., and Goswami, U., 'Amplitude Modulation Structure in French and German Poetry: Universal Acoustic Physical Structures Underpin Different Poetic Rhythm Structures', Royal Society Open Science 11.9 (2024),

     

    'Goethe und Arthur Hugh Clough', in Goethe-Jahrbuch 140 (2023), 33-43.

     

    'Rhythmus (Rhythm)', in , vol. 1, no. 2, Nov. 2021, doi:10.5195/glpc.2021.42.

     

    ‘Agency and embodiment in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’, in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight, pp. 164-85

     

    ‘The delicate flux of world and spirit: Barthold Heinrich Brockes and distributed cognition’, in Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, ed. by Miranda Anderson, George Rousseau and Michael Wheeler; vol. 3 of The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 40-52.

     

    ‘A meeting of minds? The dialogue between voices female and male in the poems of the West-östlicher Divan’, in Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, 1750-1850, ed. by Laura Deiulio and John Lyon (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 209-226.

     

    ‘Cognition in Action: Goethe’s ²Ñä°ù³¦³ó±ð²Ô’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 87.3 (2018), 121-130.

     

    ‘Movement and embodiment in Klopstock and Goethe’, German Life and Letters 70.4 (2017), 508-17.

     

    ‘Johann Peter Hebel and the dynamics of hope’, German Life and Letters 68.4 (2015), 517-28.

     

     â€˜Sie ist so ferne ihm, und doch so nah: reciprocity and exchange in the lyric poetry of Sophie Mereau’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 84 (2015), 63-75.

     

    ‘Home and homelessness in works by Novalis, Dorothea Schlegel, and Tieck’, Modern Language Review 109.4 (2014), 1030-47.

     

    ‘Im flüßgen Element hin und wieder schweifen: development and return in Goethe’s poetry and Hegel’s philosophy’, Goethe Yearbook 20 (2013), 167-77.

     

    ‘Mignon and the idea of the secret’, chapter in The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature. Essays in honour of Nicholas Boyle, ed. by John Walker (Legenda, 2013), pp. 61-69.

     

    ‘Durch Wunderkraft erschienen: affinities between Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Modern Language Review 107.1 (2012), 198-210, reprinted in German in British-deutscher Literaturtransfer 1756-1832, ed. by Lore Knapp and Eike Kronshage (De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 193-200.

     

    ‘Wenn ich leben soll, so sei es mit dir! The relationship between father and son in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre’, German Life and Letters 64.4 (2011), 489-500.

     

    ‘Fausts Credo in wechselnder Beleuchtung’, Jahrburch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (2011), 8-22.

     

    Book reviews for the Modern Language Review and the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies.

     

    Podcasts / radio appearances

    (podcast)

     

    (taster video)

     

    (BBC Radio 4)

     

    (podcast)

     

    (BBC Radio 3; introduction to an English-language dramatization of Goethe's novel)

     

    Book reviews for the Modern Language Review and the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies.