Catriona MacLeod

Biography

Catriona MacLeod works in the area of German eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, aesthetics, and the visual arts. Her recent publications have focused on various aspects of intermediality, including narrative theory, ekphrasis, and description; objects and stuff; “minor” and “miniature” genres; and the presence of sculpture in literature and film.

Much of her recent work has been devoted to word and image studies and material culture in the context of German Classicism and Romanticism. MacLeod is now working on a new book project, Romantic Scraps: Cutouts, Collages, and Inkblots, which explores how Romantic authors and visual artists cut, glue, stain, and recycle paper; generating paper cuts, collages, and ink blot poems in profusion, and even combining them in what are for their time striking new hybrid forms such as the picture books of fairy-tale author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) and medical doctor and poet Justinus Kerner (1786-1862).  The book has been supported by a fellowship in 2018 from the ACLS.

She is the author of Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Wayne State University Press). Her most recent book, Fugitive Objects: Literature and Sculpture in the German Nineteenth Century, appeared in 2014 with Northwestern University Press and was awarded the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for best book in Romanticism Studies. MacLeod also co-edited the volume Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures, which appeared in 2016.  That project resulted in two articles on displaced philologies connecting Kafka with his first translators into English, Edwin and Willa Muir, with reference to their role in Scottish modernist language debates over vernaculars.

Past Secretary of the International Association of Word and Image Studies, MacLeod is the co-editor of two volumes in the area of interarts scholarship: Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image Relationships (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009) and Efficacité/Efficacy: How to Do Things with Words and Images? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). Since 2011, she has been senior editor of the journal Word & Image. In 2015, she was elected Vice President of the Goethe Society of North America, and became President in January, 2019.

At the University of Pennsylvania, MacLeod was the 2011 recipient of the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Arts and Sciences. 

MacLeod studied at the University of Glasgow, Scotland (M.A.) and at Harvard (Ph.D.).

Publications

Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures

With Bethany Wiggin, Northwestern University Press
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2011

Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century

Northwestern University Press
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2013

Éfficacité/Efficacity: How to Do Things with Words and Images?

With Jan Baetens & Véronique Plesch, Rodopi
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2011

Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image Relationships

With Véronique Plesch & Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Rodopi
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2009

Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller

Wayne State University Press
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1998

“Flirting with Sculptural Indecency: Theodor Storm’s Realist Psyche.” In Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Jana Funke and Jen Grove (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 105-24.

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“Invisible Sculpture, Latent Violence, and Monumental Parody in Mädchen in Uniform.”  Special issue of Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, ed. Ilinca Iurascu, Revisiting Mädchen in Uniform: Media, Texts, Contexts, 1930-2015, 55.2 (2019): 128-43.

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“Displaced Vernaculars: Edwin and Willa Muir, Kafka, and the Languages of Modernism,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 93.1 (2018): 48-57.

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“Blind Spots of Narration? Ekphrasis and Laocoön Digressions in the Novel.”  In Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Richard Meek and David Kennedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 109-25.

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“Word & Image à 32” (with Michèle Hannoosh and John Dixon Hunt), La Part de l’Oeil 31 (2017-18): 179-82.

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“The Living Past: Folklore and Fairy Tales in Literature and Art.” In The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints, ed. John Ittmann (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017), 208-27.

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“The Reading Public: Taschenbücher and Other Illustrated Books.” In The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints, ed. John Ittmann (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017), 198-207.

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“Lost and Found in Translation: The Itinerant Kafka Translations of Edwin and Willa Muir.” In Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures, ed. Bethany Wiggin and Catriona MacLeod (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 177-90.

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“Brentano’s Remains: Visual and Verbal Bricolage in Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (1838),” The Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 221-43.

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“Cutting up the Salon: Adele Schopenhauer’s ‘Zwergenhochzeit’ and Goethe’s ‘Hochzeitlied’,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 89.1 (2015): 70-87.

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Profiles

Andrei Pop
Andrei Pop
Modern Art and Aesthetics
Department Chair
CWAC 162 | Tuesdays 1-2pm or by appointment.
773.702.0278
Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson
Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Urban History
CWAC 260
773.702.0270
Wei-Cheng Lin
Wei-Cheng Lin
Chinese Art and Architecture
Architectural Studies Advisor
CWAC 268 | Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am and 12-1pm
773.702.0268
2006-07
Iowa State University
Assistant Professor, East Asian Art and Architecture
Potters Wheel
Richard Neer
Ancient Greek Art and Architecture
CWAC 259
773.702.5890
Megan Sullivan
Megan Sullivan
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
CWAC 272
773.702.5126