Johannes Wankhammer focuses on critical and aesthetic theory, the cultural history of attention, and the environmental humanities. His research and teaching draw on the long eighteenth century as a laboratory of realized and unrealized modernities to explore origins of – and alternatives to – contemporary notions of critique, attention, and human relationships with the extra-human world.

His first book Creatures of Attention: Aesthetics and the Subject before Kant (Cornell University Press, 2024) offers a conceptual deep history of contemporary concerns with attention and self-control. The book traces the discovery of attention (Aufmerksamkeit) as a mental faculty in the German eighteenth century and argues that early aesthetics emerged in large part as a critical reflection on Enlightenment paradigms of attention.

Before joining Princeton, Johannes taught at Reed College as Visiting Assistant Professor. He earned his PhD in German Studies from Cornell University and holds additional degrees in Comparative Literature and German Studies from Binghamton University and the University of Graz, Austria. His work on eighteenth-century poetics and aesthetics and on various topics in ecocriticism has appeared in journals such as The Germanic Review, Modern Language Notes, and literatur für leser:innen. In 2021, he co-edited a special issue of MLN on “Scenes of Writing.”