Jessica Resvick

(she/her/hers)

  • Assistant Professor of German

Areas of Study

Education

  • PhD, University of Chicago, 2019
  • MA, Dartmouth College, 2013
  • ScB, Brown University, 2011

Biography

My research and teaching interests center on the poetics of knowledge in the long nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, my work draws from the histories of science and ideas to study how media shape what we know. My first book, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Reality (under review), charts the media-historical and epistemological underpinnings of realist narrative prose. I am also at work on a second book project, From Stereotype to Isotype: Media, Individuality, and Society, which traces out the media history of typological thought in German and American science, graphic design, and literature. You can read more about my research and teaching at jessicaresvick.com.

  • Media history

  • History of science

  • Poetics of knowledge

  • “Mediating the Nineteenth Century: Literature, Science, and the History of Knowledge.” German Studies Review 46, no. 1 (2023): 132–34. [*invited contribution]

  • “Wechsel-Dauer (Change-Constancy).” Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 2, no. 1 (2022).

  • “Picturesque Mediations: Adalbert Stifter, Washington Irving, and the Transfiguration of the Mundane.” PMLA 137, no. 5 (2022): 841–56.

  • “The Author as Editor: The Aesthetics of Recension in Adalbert Stifter’s Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters.” In Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Vance Byrd and Ervin Malakaj, 147–70. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020.

  • “Repetition and Textual Transmission: The Gothic Motif in Goethe’s Faust and ‘Von deutscher Baukunst.’” Goethe Yearbook 25 (2018): 133–60. [*Honorable Mention, Goethe Society of North America Annual Essay Prize]

     

Spring 2025

Elementary German — GERM 102

Once Upon a Time: Gender, Nation, and Childhood in Grimms’ Fairy Tales — GERM 130

Intermediate German — GERM 204

Fall 2025

Deals with the Devil: The Faust Legend — GERM 254

Kafka and the Kafkaesque — GERM 411

Notes

Jessica Resvick Article Published in "Theory, Culture, and Society"

March 19, 2025

Assistant Professor of German Jessica Resvick's article, "Freud's Media: Transference, Metaphor, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture" appeared in Theory, Culture, and Society. The article, which incorporates material from Oberlin Libraries Special Collections, explicates the significance of nineteenth-century print culture to early psychoanalytic thought.

Jessica Resvick Contributes to Volume on 19th-Century Writer

February 12, 2025

Assistant Professor of German Jessica Resvick published a chapter in the edited volume A Companion to the Works of Adalbert Stifter. Her chapter focuses on the first two versions of the novel My Great-Grandfather’s Notebook and traces out a particular orientation to the past that lies at the heart of the great 19th-century writer’s works.

News

College of Arts and Sciences Welcomes New Faculty for 2023-24

September 18, 2023

Students choose Oberlin—and thrive at Oberlin—because of the nurturing mentorship of the outstanding faculty who guide their learning. We are honored to welcome the newest additions to our faculty across the College of Arts and Sciences for 2023-24.

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