This year, the Margaret Fuller Society (MFS) is spending time getting to know its leaders and members, who live all over the world. This month we honor the work of Graduate Student Liaison, Andrew Wildermuth, who recently answered some questions from MFS Web Developer Christina Katopodis.
Wildermuth is a graduate student in North American studies in Erlangen, Germany, and holds interests in poetics and politics, romanticism, and biopolitics. He is originally from Annapolis, Maryland, where he attended Anne Arundel Community College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He also works as a copyeditor and writes his own poems, with recent poems published in Columbia Journal, EcoTheo Review, and SOFTBLOW.
If you run into Wildermuth at a conference or on Zoom, you might ask him about how to attend tuition-free grad school in Germany as a non-EU citizen (or about tasty German beverages).
Katopodis: What is one thing about Fuller that you admire or find inspiring?
Wildermuth: I am perplexed and inspired by Margaret Fuller’s ceaseless imagination and ambition, her wide and bending conceptions of gender, as well as her always-surprising use of language. An 1835 journal fragment that haunts and scares me: “aims unreached occasions lost.”
Katopodis: What would you like to see the Margaret Fuller Society accomplish in the next 5 years?
Wildermuth: I would like to see the Margaret Fuller Society provide platforms for research and teaching that critically explores race, racism, and colonialism in the work of Margaret Fuller. I believe we need to build better vocabularies to understand how racial and racist discourse operates in early U.S. literature, especially in literature often considered liberal or progressive.
Katopodis: What is one thing you did or learned in the pandemic that you are proud of?
Wildermuth: I revived my running habit somewhat, which has nicely balanced a simultaneous revival of interest in wine and beer!
We thank Wildermuth for spending time to tell us more about himself. If you would like to read some of his scholarship, keep an eye out for two articles forthcoming this spring/summer: a paper on the sonnet politics of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows in the journal Aspeers; and a paper on Shelley’s Frankenstein and biopolitics in the journal ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik.
