I’m an academic and writer. Currently, I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, with a fellowship of the German Research Foundation. My scholarly interests are authorship, literary fiction, and social theory. How can fiction writing and poetry elucidate what theorists write about abstractly? And in turn, how can authorship explain the inner workings of democratic theory?
I received my PhD from University College London in 2021 with a sociology of authorship and publishing in the humanities. After my PhD, I worked as a researcher at DZHW Berlin, looking into the meaning of authorship in science, and new developments of science cultures in Germany. I also contribute critically to the discourse on open access to scholarly publications and have been instrumental in the debate on open humanities.
My studies were supported by doctoral scholarships of the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK (AHRC UK) through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP). Subsequent projects were funded or commissioned by the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research), and the Volkswagen Stiftung. Currently, I hold a postdoctoral scholarship of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Besides my academic work, I also write literary fiction and poetry myself. I’ve a collection of poetry and a novel that I (self-)published for friends and colleagues. My poetic work revolves around the triad of nature’s transformative power, the weight of lived and collective history, and the intricate ways in which language shapes identity and connection. The novel is about remebrance culture. It is set in the Harz mountains in Germany and plays with symbolic motifs of nature and ferrytales. Both poetry and the novel are in German, and I’m looking into publishing them professionally at some point.
I’m a trained bookseller. I worked at different academic publishing houses in the UK and Germany prior to my research. Projects included work at John Wiley & Sons (Oxford), De Gruyter (Berlin), The Academic Book of the Future project (London), Knowledge Unlatched (Berlin & London), and the International Arthurian Society, among others.
Contact me:
marcel.knoechelmann[at]yale.edu