John Kenneth Noyes

Acting Associate Chair, Graduate Studies
Professor of German
Extraordinary Professor, Modern Foreign Languages, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
Vice-President, International Herder Society

Contact info

john.noyes@utoronto.ca
For graduate matters: german.grad@utoronto.ca

Office
University of Toronto
Odette Hall 304
50 St. Joseph Street
Toronto, ON M5S 3L5

Phone 416-926-2344

Office Hours

tba

Classes 2022 – 2023

GER305HF German Literature II
GER410HF Intellectual History: Enlightenment and After
GER1480HS Goethe’s Faust

Background

Ph.D. Cape Town 1989

Recent Fellowships and Awards

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Connection Grant for Planetary Humanities workshop

Vice Provost’s International Fund grant for Planetary Humanities workshop

Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Project: Global Humanities (2020 and 2021)

Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada Insight Grant for the project “Goethe’s World” (2018)

John K. Noyes, Herder: Aesthetics Against Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2015. Winner of Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, best book 2014-2015.

Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Project: Global Citizenship and the Practice of Being Human. South African Visions and the legacy of Enlightenment (2016 and 2017)

National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for project The Legacy of Herder’s Theory of Cultural Difference and Universal Reason (2014)

Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Project: Global Citizenship and the Practice of Being Human. South African Visions and the legacy of Enlightenment (2016 and 2017)

My Current Projects

I’m completing a book manuscript with the working title “Goethe’s World.”

I’m currently translating Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität” to be included in the Cambridge English edition of Herder’s works.

I’m working on an ongoing project called Planetary Humanities

Recent Books

John K. Noyes, ed. Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches. Rochester: Camden House 2018.

John K. Noyes, Herder: Aesthetics Against Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2015.

Hans Schulte, John K. Noyes, Pia Kleber (eds.). Goethe’s Faust – Theatre of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011.

Recent Publications

“Herder’s argument for art as nature in the sixth collection of the Humanitätsbriefe,” Herder and Naturalism, ed. Nigel DeSouza. Berlin: De Gruyter. Forthcoming.

“Die Literaturunterricht im Ausland. Politik der Viszeralität,” Globalgeschichten der deutschen Literatur. Methoden – Ansätze – Probleme, ed. David Kim and Urs Buettner. Berlin: Springer 2022: 343-355.

“Herder als ‚Geograph der Schönheit’. Die klassische Welt und die Erkenntnis der Schönheit,” to appear in: Der ›andere Klassiker‹. Johann Gottfried Herder und die Weimarer Konstellation um 1800, ed. Hans Adler and Werner Frick. Göttingen: Wallstein 2022: 211-32.

“Colonial Space,” Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy, ed. V.Y. Mudimbe and K. Kavwahirehi. Berlin: Springer 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-2068-5_83

“Herder and Marx,” Herder and the 19th Century, ed. Liisa Steinby. Tübingen: Synchron 2020: 179-93.

“Goethe’s World,” German in the World. The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, ed. James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield. Rochester: Camden House 2020: 22-33.

“Humanism, embodied knowledge, and postcolonial theory,” Postcolonialism Cross-Examined. Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present, ed. Monika Albrecht. London: Routledge 2020: 51-64.

Herder’s Changing Climate: Natural History, Revolution, and the Disciplines,” Herder Jahrbuch / Herder Yearbook 16 (2022), 67-80.

Welt (World)Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 2 (2021), 116-128.

“Global Humanities:  Pursuing New Discourses and New Institutions for Life on Earth,” Knowledge Cultures 9/1 (2021): 35–55. Co-authored with Bo Stråth.

“Outlandish Reading and the Critique of the Human,” The German Quarterly 92/4 (2019), 472-5.

“Humanism, Embodied Knowledge, and Postcolonial Theory,” Postcolonialism Cross-Examined. Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present, ed. Monika Albrecht (London: Routledge 2020), 51-64.

“Goethe’s Future,” Back to the Future. Proceedings of the 50th Wisconsin Workshop held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, September 14-16, 2017, ed. Marc Silverman (Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2018), 9-36.

“Literatur, Wahrheit, Menschsein,” Literaturwissenschaften in der Krise. Zur Rolle und Relevanz literarischer Praktiken in globalen Krisenzeiten. Edited by Anya Heise-von der Lippe and Russell West-Pavlov (Tübingen: Narr 2018), 41-8.