Christoph Bode
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christoph Bode (born May 13, 1952, in Siegen/North Rhine-Westphalia) is a literary scholar. His fields are British and American literature, comparative literature, literary theory, poetics, and travel writing, but he is mainly known as a romanticist and a narratologist. He was full professor and chair of Modern English Literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München until his retirement in March 2018.
Bode is the second child of the headmaster of a private language school and university lecturer (Anglistik und Amerikanistik) Dr. Adolf Bode and his wife Ute Bode (born Kuß). Bode was educated in his home town of Siegen (1959–1971), before reading English and American literature, geography, and philosophy/pedagogy at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, and University College Cardiff (1971–1976). After his graduation from Marburg in 1976 (state examination), Bode received his Ph.D. from the same university in 1978 (English and American literature, with philosophy/pedagogy as minor subject). This was followed by Bode's alternative service as conscientious objector (1978–1980).
Career in academia
From 1977 to 1986, Bode was an assistant professor and, from 1986 to 1992, associate professor at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany. In 1989/90 he temporarily filled the position as a professor of English and American literature at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. In 1992, he was made professor of English and American literature at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, and in 1997 he was visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2001, Bode accepted the offer of a chair of English literature from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, after rejecting a parallel offer from Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg. Since then, Bode was visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (2012), at Tsinghua University, Beijing and at the University of Sichuan, Chengdu (both in 2015). In 2016, he was Mercator Fellow at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and after his retirement in 2018 Erasmus Scholar at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow and distinguished guest at the Chinese University, Hong Kong in 2019.
Focus in research and teaching
Bode is a specialist in British, European, and American Romanticism and Modernist literature. With a background in philosophy and aesthetics (Ästhetik der Ambiguität, 1988), he is also a narratologist (The Novel, 2011; European Research Council project "Narrating Futures") and an expert in poetics. Other facets of his research include literary theory and travel writing. Bode was President of the Gesellschaft für Englische Romantik[1] (Society for English Romanticism) 2001 through 2013, since then he has served as Vice-President for International Relations.
Memberships
Bode is a member of about a dozen learned societies and associations, among them
- Deutscher Anglistikverband (advisory board 1998-2002)
- North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)
- British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
- Academia Europaea[2]
Prizes, awards, fellowships
- 2007 Christensen Fellowship, University of Oxford (Visiting Fellow of St Catherine's College)
- 2007 Corresponding Fellow, English Association, UK
- 2007/08 Sabbatical year funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (German Research Foundation) for research on the discursive construction of identity in British Romanticism
- 2008/09 Sabbatical year funded by the Exzellenzinitiative des Bundes for research on the History and Theory of British Travel Writing
- 2009-12 Advanced Investigator Grant of the European Research Council (ERC): "Narrating Futures" project[3] (900.000 €). Bode was the first English Literature scholar in Europe to receive such a grant and the first Humanities scholar in Germany
- 2010 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) at LMU Munich
- 2011 Fellow of the Academia Europaea
- 2013 Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Merit Cross on Ribbon)
- 2015 Walker Ames Lecture Award of the University of Washington, Seattle
- 2015 High-End Foreign Experts Program of the People's Republic of China
- 2015 Research Fellowship of St Catherine's College, University of Oxford
Referee and advisory boards
Bode serves on ca. 15 advisory boards, among them those of the European Research Council, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Volkswagenstiftung, Max Weber Stiftung, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Schweizer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Fulbright Commission, Cusanus-Werk and European Romantic Review. He also reviews for Studies in Romanticism, Literature Compass, publishers Routledge and Edinburgh University Press as well as the Leverhulme Trust. He also worked as a reviewer for the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies.
