Merlin Ganzevoort

Merlin graduated from Philipps-University of Marburg, where he received his B.A. in European Literatures and his M.A. in German Literature. During his postgraduate studies, he spent an academic year at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, before joining the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies in 2021. He was awarded the Max-Kade-Dissertation-Grant for a stay at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach in the summer of 2025.

His dissertation examines a dominant trend in contemporary Germanophone literary poetics that wrestles with the conflictual legacy of modernism in the 21st century. Instead of a radical rupture with the past, contemporary literature reexamines its interwovenness with selective pasts, particularly 1920s Weimar culture, by incorporating and transforming historical modernism in the search for orientation in the cultural present. In doing so, many of these works utilize hybrid media aesthetics by incorporating painting, photography, film, and digital media. To unravel these complex entanglements, he focuses on premodern and posthuman figures and tropes, such as cannibals, nomads, and non-humans.