Derek Hillard

Candidate statement

Derek Hillard (Ph.D., Indiana University, 2001) is Professor and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at Kansas State University. His first monograph is Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan (Bucknell UP, 2010). He was awarded a DAAD grant to carry out research at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2001 and a Marbacher Stipendium in 2010. Since his first GSA in 1999, he has participated in numerous GSA panels, round tables, and seminars. Interested in the intersection of literature, arts, history, and studies of emotions, he co-founded with colleagues in history an interdisciplinary GSA network, the Emotions Studies Network. Interactions with GSA colleagues led to a recent co-edited volume (with Heikki Lempa and Russell Spinney), Feelings Materialized: Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany (Berghahn, 2020), with contributions from scholars who had presented research at interdisciplinary Emotions Studies events. Such collaborations in emotions studies continue with a second project—likewise the result of recent GSA interdisciplinary seminars—to be co-edited with Erika Quinn and Holly Yanacek. In addition to research on Paul Celan and emotions studies, he has published on German modernists, such as Alfred Döblin and Ernst Jünger, and was awarded the DAAD/GSA Article Prize in 2007 for an essay on R. M. Rilke published in the German Studies Review.