Johannes Wankhammer’s research focuses on critical and aesthetic theory, the histories of attention and note-taking, and the environmental humanities. Before joining the Princeton, he briefly taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Reed College. He earned his PhD in German Studies from Cornell University, where he was awarded a Mellon Graduate Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities.

Johannes's first book Creatures of Attention: Aesthetics and the Subject before Kant (Cornell UP) 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. Side projects include articles on the concept of contingency at the intersection of cosmology and poetics and on J. J. Breitinger’s poetics of attention.

A parallel interest in the history of note-taking has led to the publication of a co-edited special issue of MLN on “Scenes of Writing.” The issue includes an article on the interplay of attention and note-taking in G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s wastebooks and an English translation of Rüdiger Campe’s foundational essay “Die Schreibszene, Schreiben” (“Writing; The Scene of Writing”).

Recent work increasingly addresses problems of representation and knowledge in the environmental humanities. Publications in this area include an article on the ambivalent status of anthropomorphic plant descriptions in recent German environmental writing, a handbook article on metaphors of roots and rootedness in Western culture, and an essay on narrative experiments with representing the dynamism of natural worlds in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene). These articles serve as the basis for Johannes’s current book project, which undertakes a critical environmental history of German aesthetics.