Constanze Güthenke is a Hellenist and Comparatist. Since 2014 she has been Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford. Before that, from 2002 to 2014, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Classics and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. She is a founding member of the collaborative group The Postclassicism Collective.

Her main research area is the modern knowledge of antiquity; her main strategy is to read scholarly texts as literature. Her most recent monograph Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) attempts a critical reading of the intersection between the romantic discourse of feeling and the imagery of professional philology. Her emphasis is on the situatedness of knowledge and its forms of expression, especially in light of international transfers. She has published another monograph on romantic philhellenism and modern Greek literature (2008), as well as pieces on questions of hermeneutics, on ancient and modern biography, and on exemplarity as a form of reading.

During her fellowship she will continue to work on a project on the history of Classics in America since 1800. Her aim is to open up the complex historical traingulation between America, Europe, and antiquity, and to claim that in this space disorientation is both a fundamental element of disciplinary practice, but also a term with significance for future disciplinary narratives and self-understanding.

Her collaboration partner is Astrid Böger, professor of American Studies at the Institute for English and American Studies at Universität Hamburg.

Constanze Güthenke’s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.