Carlos Spoerhase

Carlos Spoerhase teaches at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU). He studied German literature, philosophy and political theory. After completing his doctoral studies at Humboldt University Berlin and Johns Hopkins University, he obtained his doctorate at Humboldt University Berlin, where he also completed his habilitation to direct research. After holding professorships at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Bielefeld University, he has been Professor of German Literature at LMU since 2022. Spoerhase was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2023-2024) and has held various visiting professorships, including at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University.

The project

Title: Literary history and social theory: The case of the Nobel Prize in Literature

« The Nobel Prize in Literature, first awarded in 1901, is the world’s most recognizable literary award. It not only points to the existence of a global literary field, but has long helped constitute, stabilize, and structure that field. The project, situated at the meeting point of literary history, the sociology of cultural prizes, and recent scholarship on the practices of comparing, seeks to reconstruct the Nobel Prize in Literature as an institution that forms diverse, largely normative, cultural practices into distinct communities of practice that serve to render literature comparable on a global level. The Nobel Prize has played a crucial role in literature’s globalization, connecting areas of literary activity and interest across languages, cultures, and nations. It can be seen as a complex, reflexive, and recurring practice of comparing that in turn renders distinct literary works comparable. In purporting to evaluate authors and works situated in very different political, social, and cultural contexts according to common criteria, the Nobel Prize in Literature has become an institution of global comparison, promoting “universal” standards. The project will bring together individual case studies under the overarching question of the globalization of the literary field. »

Hosting institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• A World Prize for a World Thinker? How Hannah Arendt tried to get Karl Jaspers the Nobel Prize. In: Journal of World Literature 8,4 (2023), S. 569–587.
• The Nobel Roll of Honor: Comparing Literatures and Compiling Lists of Nobel Laureates in the Early 20th Century. In: Orbis Litterarum 78 (2023), S.147–166 (with Jørgen Sneis).
• „A Monster in Its Breadth and Length”: Schiller’s Wallenstein and the Poetics of Scale. In: Modern Philology 118 (2020), S. 87–106.
• Offprints: Modern Media of Academic Sociability. In: History of Humanities 5 (2020), S. 383–409.