Nikolaus Wegmann, professor of German, transferred to emeritus status July 1, 2024, after eighteen years of distinguished service at Princeton University. A dedicated teacher and member of the University community, Nikolaus is a celebrated specialist in the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century and a renowned scholar in the field of media studies. In the 1970s, Nikolaus studied linguistics, literature, and philosophy under such legendary figures as Karl Heinz Bohrer, Reinhart Koselleck, and Niklas Luhmann, and he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the literature of Empfindsamkeit (sentimentality) under Wilhelm Vosskamp at the University of Bielefeld in 1984. He later completed his habilitation at the University of Cologne with a book on the library as a technical and intellectual medium. Before he came to Princeton in 2006, Nikolaus taught at the University of Cologne, the University of Bielefeld, and the University of Potsdam, and he enjoyed appointments at Washington University, Cornell University, and the University of Iowa. For six years, he chaired Princeton’s German Department, which thrived as a result of his careful stewardship and close collaborations with the Humanities Council. He served his term as chair with great affability and organizational savvy. 

Nikolaus’s first monograph, Discourses of Sentimentality: On the History of a Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1988), was a pathbreaking book that established a model for the subsequent study of affect and emotion in literature and art. Combining the theoretical frameworks of Luhmann and Michel Foucault with the work of Koselleck and Carl Schmitt, this ambitious historical study revealed a previously unconsidered side of the German Enlightenment. In 1994, Nikolaus followed Discourses of Sentimentality with a field-defining, book-length essay titled “What Does It Mean to Read a ‘Classic Text’? Philological Reflections between Science and Education.” As one review observed at the time, Nikolaus’s influential essay on the construction of “classic” texts was itself destined to become a classic. Nikolaus’s second book, The Labyrinth of Books: Searching and Finding in the Alexandrian Age (2000), explored the library not as a material accumulation of books but as a technical medium and even a machinery of thought. The book was enthusiastically received and widely quoted by scholars of German literature as well as practitioners of library science, who continue to place Nikolaus’s study on their syllabi. This canonical work will soon appear in English translation. 

Beyond these three deeply original and innovative scholarly publications, Nikolaus’s vita has been defined by a series of far-reaching intellectual collaborations. Early in his career, he worked on a large-scale project in Bielefeld and Cologne on the history of literary studies from the end of the eighteenth century to the 1920s. Over fifteen years, he coordinated a collaboration between the University of Cologne, University of Bonn, and Technical University in Aachen that encompassed over 100 scholars. It was his work as director of this enterprise that prompted Nikolaus’s first reflections on networks and organizations, and that eventually led him to the field of media studies. The subsequent work was inspired and facilitated by a series of fellowships and residencies at high-profile research institutions: the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at Bauhaus University, Weimar, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule of Zurich, the Digital Cultures Research Lab of Leuphana University, the Spaces of Anthropology Research Group at University of Bochum, and a Gutenberg Fellowship in Cultural History at Gutenberg University in Mainz. 

In the years that followed, Nikolaus became a key figure in the intellectual and disciplinary exchange between German and Anglo-American literary studies. In addition to organizing a number of influential conferences, Nikolaus, together with Thomas Y. Levin, founded the collaborative Princeton-Weimar Media Studies Summer School, which transformed the landscape of Princeton’s graduate programs. Nikolaus was also instrumental in the founding of the American Friends of Marbach, which continues to promote research at Germany’s premier literary archive. 

Two ongoing, large-scale publication projects have maintained Nikolaus’s status at the top of his field. The first is his role as vice president of the Friedrich Schlegel Society, which he founded in 2007 with his friend and colleague Ulrich Breuer. The following year, the duo succeeded Manfred Frank and Jochen Hörisch as editors of Athenäum, the leading journal on German Romanticism. Over the next ten years, Breuer and Nikolaus became the leading names in Schlegel studies, with Breuer publishing Schlegel’s Critical Edition and Nikolaus editing the annual journal. The two organized international conferences in Berlin, Marbach, Luxembourg, Mainz, and Odense. Schlegel continues to be a source of inspiration for the scholarship of Nikolaus, who returns to the Romantic’s thought often and regularly references Schlegel’s philosophy of philology, in particular. 

The second ongoing project focuses on the tradition of German media studies known as “cultural techniques.” Together with Matthias Bickenbach and Heiko Christians, Nikolaus has published three volumes of the Historical Dictionary of Media Usage between 2014 and 2022. At 2,000 pages in length and with more than 100 lemmata and fifty contributors, this epic undertaking promises to redefine the landscape of German media studies by investigating the ontic operations that organize and enable our interactions with media. Bernhard Siegert, one of the founding figures in the study of cultural techniques, has aptly called the Historical Dictionary of Media Usage an enterprise of “monumental” scope. 

Written by members of the German Department faculty.