Prof. Dr. Philipp Schweighauser

Philipp Schweighauser is Professor of North American and General Literature. He received his MA in English and German Philology and his PhD in Anglophone Literary Studies, both from the University of Basel. After a one-year research stay at the University of California, Irvine (2000-2001), a postdoc position at the University of Berne (2003-2007), and an Assistant Professorship at the University of Göttingen (2007-2009), he returned to the University of Basel in 2009. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and Boston University. From 2012 to 2020, Schweighauser served as the President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies. He has worked on a wide variety of issues in American Studies, but his main foci are 18th to 21st c. American literature and culture; literary history, literary, cultural, and media theory; literature and science; literature and anthropology; life writing; sound studies; and aesthetics. He has published three monographs: Boasian Verse: The Poetic and Ethnographic Work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (Routledge, 2023), Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (U of Virginia P, 2016), and The Noises of American Literature, 1890–1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (UP Florida, 2006). He is directing the Claudine und Hans-Heiner Zaeslin-Bustany Foundation project Anglo Genres for Atlantic Futures: Contemporary Eco-Fictions, Campus Novels, and Science Fictions (2025-2029).

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Selected Publications

Schweighauser, Philipp. (2023). A Self-Made Slave: Cultural Techniques in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. In Austenfeld, Thomas;Zurbrügg, Aurélie (Ed.), Who Tells Your Story? (pp. 19–37). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.33675/SPELL/202

URLs

Schweighauser, Philipp. (2023). Boasian Verse: The Poetic and Ethnographic Work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. In Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003266945

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Schweighauser, Philipp. (2016). Beautiful Deceptions. European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Schweighauser, Philipp. (2015). Literary Acoustics. In Rippl, Gabriele (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality: Literature - Image - Sound - Music (pp. 475–493). Tübingen: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110311075-027

URLs

Schweighauser, Philipp. (2006). The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (University Press of Florida, ed.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

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Selected Projects & Collaborations

Anglo Genres for Atlantic Futures: Contemporary Eco-Fictions, Campus Novels, and Science Fictions

Research Project | 7 Project Members

“Anglo Genres for Atlantic Futures: Contemporary Eco-Fictions, Campus Novels, and Science Fictions” focuses on contemporary works in three popular literary genres that originated in the Anglophone world and address key social issues in today's knowledge societies on both sides of the Atlantic: eco-fiction (including climate change), campus novels (including the role of universities in knowledge societies), and science fiction (including AI). The three subprojects will examine the forms, psychological and social implications, and cultural significance of these genres from a literary and cultural studies perspective.

The project serves to examine US and British popular cultural products from a continental European perspective. Through the planned publications, international conferences, lectures, and stays abroad, the project aims to promote academic and cultural exchange between the University of Basel and the Anglophone world and to make a substantial contribution to ongoing discussions in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies.

Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality

Research Project | 2 Project Members

"Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality" is a 3-year project that aims to explore and describe the dynamics of Beckett's media system. Technology shapes Beckett's output in crucial ways on three levels: it plays a pivotal role in the production of his work, appears prominently on the diegetic plane of his plays, and shapes the textual and medial organization of his texts and productions. Yet it has only recently been recognized that Beckett is a pre-eminent multimedia artist whose innovations influence media art to the present day. The excitement of this recognition is coupled with a challenge posed by the realization that much of the technology, which the aesthetics of Beckett's media works depend on, belongs to the past. Since the reflection on the effects of media technologies on culturally established norms of representation define Beckett's work in fundamental ways, this historical distance creates the need for technologically informed re-readings of a representative cross-section of Beckett's work in several media. At the same time, the significance of the project can be understood in broader terms. For Beckett is a privileged observer of a medial transition whose subtle artistic negotiations of newly emerging systems of cultural exchange, which also define our present, offer unique insights into how the epistemological and anthropological parameters of culture change. Our project applies a comprehensive multimedial perspective to Beckett's work, combining media archaeology with close reading, transformational analysis, and media- and genre-historical contextualization. Our main analytical focus is on Beckett's creative combination of varying medial configurations and communication paradigms, including writing, electromagnetic sound recording, radio transmission, cinematography, and audiovisual broadcasting. In staging these combinations, Beckett reflects upon and enacts the radical impact that medial and technological developments had on basic human activities such as reading, speaking, listening, seeing, and remembering. In Beckett's plays, dismembered organs (Mouth), disembodied human faculties (Voice), media fields (Music, Word), and apparatuses (Tape) are dramatic characters that attain a status equal to human beings. Beckett not only thematizes technology and uses it in the production of his work; he also abuses apparatuses in the sense that he disrupts their functioning by staging processes of interference (remediation, mimicry, hybridization) between them to expose how they shape perception and cognition. In the framework of our project, we analyze a range of materials available in The Samuel Beckett Collection of the University of Reading Library, some of which have not been discussed by scholars, while this body of material has not been researched from a sustained media-theoretical perspective yet. Much of the project's innovative thrust stems from its sustained effort to bring together some of the most powerful voices in contemporary anglophone Beckett scholarship and German media analysis (especially media archaeology but also Luhmannian systems theory and historical epistemology) to think anew the interplay between media, materiality, aisthesis, and the discursive processes in Beckett's work. Our ultimate aim is to rethink Beckett's oeuvre as a complex, dynamic media system.

Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead

Research Project | 5 Project Members

"Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead" is a 3-year research project that brings together literary scholars and cultural anthropologists to explore convergences between three types of alterity: cultural alterity (the otherness of the cultures anthropologists study), poetic alterity (the use of poetry in anthropological investigation), and medial alterity (the use of then non-conventional media such as photographs and films in anthropological investigation) in the work of three preeminent cultural anthropologists: Sapir, Benedict, and Mead, who conceptualized 'culture' and 'cultural relativism,' two of the most influential concepts in the 20 th c. social sciences. Out of the three, it is Mead who has become famous for experimenting with media other than the standard ethnographic text already in the 1930s, particularly photography and film. What is less known is that, together, our three anthropologists wrote over 500 poems, dedicated poems to one another, and published a good number of them in renowned literary magazines such as The Dial and Poetry . This prolific, collaborative poetic output, much of which engages with the objects of the writers' anthropological investigations, makes them a unique group in the history of 20 th -century Cultural Anthropology: they were the only anthropologists of the era that left a sizeable (yet sorely understudied) body of poetry. Along with their ethnographic writings and relevant selections from Mead's ethnographic films and photographs, these texts and (audio)visual media form the corpus of our research project. To date, neither our anthropologists' poems nor Mead's photographs and films have been the subjects of a sustained study: previous literary scholarship has analyzed but a fraction of the poems, largely from biographical perspectives that are in danger of reducing the poems to their authors' personal lives, and most of Mead's photographs and films still linger unexamined in the Library of Congress (LoC). The current project proposes to close this gap by asking what difference it makes whether one evokes the cultural Other in standard expository ethnographic prose, in poetic language, or in (what used to be) non-conventional media of ethnographic representation such as celluloid and photographic prints. In tackling this question, we present the first sustained study of Sapir's, Benedict's, and Mead's poetic oeuvres; make an important, canon-revising intervention in the history of US modernism as well as the 20 th -century history of anthropology; and propose a reassessment of Mead's role in the development of visual anthropology that takes into account the aesthetic/aisthetic nature of her work.