Jessica Resvick

(she/her/hers)

  • Associate 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 Presence (Northwestern University Press, 2026), charts the media-historical and epistemological underpinnings of realist narrative prose. I am currently writing my second book, From Stereotype to Isotype: Media, Individuality, and Society, which traces out the media history of typological thought in German and American literature, science, photography, and graphic design. My research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the DAAD, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. You can read more about my work at jessicaresvick.com.

On research leave 2026-2027

 

  • Media history
  • History of science
  • Poetics of knowledge

  • Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence. Northwestern University Press, 2026.
  • “Realist Typologies: Character and Materiality in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben.” Germanic Review 100, no. 4 (2025): 483–96. (invited)
  • “Decomposition: Matter and Form in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich.” Monatshefte 117, no. 4 (2025): 620–34.
  • “Freud’s Media: Transference, Metaphor, and Print Culture.” Theory, Culture & Society 42, no. 5 (2025): 39–56.
  • “Backward Glances: Registers of the Past in Stifter’s Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters.” In A Companion to the Works of Adalbert Stifter, edited by Sean Ireton, 162–80. Camden House, 2025. (invited)
  • “Card Counting: The Nineteenth-Century Census.” In Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century, edited by Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra McGillen, 39–48. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024.
  • “Bookkeeping: Form and Metaphor.” In Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century, edited by Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra McGillen, 19–23. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024.
  • “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. 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)

Notes

Jessica Resvick Awarded Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship

Associate Professor of German Jessica Resvick was awarded a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to support work on her monograph, From Stereotype to Isotype: Media, Individuality, and Society. It will fund three research stays at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin.

Jessica Resvick Presents Paper at Workshop

Assistant Professor of German Jessica Resvick presented the paper "Character and Type in the Realist Novel: Dickens and Freytag" at the workshop Figures, Types, and Images of the Social in the 19th and 20th Century: Practices of Social Imagining in the History of Knowledge and the Sciences. The workshop was co-hosted by the University of Erfurt and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Jessica Resvick Co-organized Panel Series for Conference of the German Studies Association

Assistant Professor of German Jessica Resvick co-organized the panel series "Photobooks, Photo Essays, and the Body" at the Annual Conference of the German Studies Association. She also delivered a paper, "Physiognomy and Photography: August Sander's Typological Archive," for which Dlisah Lapidus '26 provided research support.

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

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

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.

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