Maya von und zur Mühlen

After growing up in Alsace, France, Maya earned her BA in English at King’s College London. During that time, she spent a semester abroad at UC Berkeley, where she studied philosophy. She then completed an MPhil in French and German literature at the University of Cambridge, followed by a joint MA/MLitt in German and Comparative literature from the University of St Andrews and the University of Bonn.

Her dissertation explores the narrative agency of sensible perception—understood as a collective and socially embedded process—in German literature of Sensibility. She connects the central role of the sensible in this literary movement to the emergence of new discourses in aesthetics, biology and geography in the eighteenth century and explores how these new ways of seeing the world help negotiate shifting relations between envisioned collectives such as social classes, genders, species, and even all earthly creatures in relation to the earth itself. She is a James B. Duke Fellow, and her research is supported by the Julian Price Graduate Fellowship in Humanities and History for the academic year 2026-2027.