Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures is pleased to announce that Max Weber, a PhD student in our Department, has been awarded an International Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) in recognition of his outstanding academic achievement and research potential.
Weber’s project, Romantic Energies: Fuel, Freedom and the Aesthetic Revolution, offers a critical study of the dialectical entanglements of freedom and energy in German Romanticism. The project develops the concept of “romantic energy” as the intersection of the aesthetic, political, and philosophical ambitions of German Romanticism with emerging materialist understandings of energy and work during a period of major socioecological transformation around 1800.
Positioned at the intersection of German literary studies, intellectual history, and the history of science, the project traces how different phases of Romanticism engaged with and reconfigured ideas of freedom, while also examining Romanticism’s entanglement with new forms of knowledge production in the sciences and the evolving economy of the period. Weber argues that newly accessible energy sources and scientific discourses on energy—alongside the impact of the French Revolution, understood by the Romantics as a central political force of the century (Schlegel [1798] 2005)—contributed not only to the so-called “aesthetic revolution” of German Romanticism, but also to the emergence of a distinct energy culture.
The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures extends its warm congratulations to Max Weber on this distinguished achievement.
