Andrea Speltz

Assistant Professor

Literary and cultural studies (the European Enlightenment and Andrea Speltz the history of educational ideas)

Video

Q&A

What is your favourite class?

I enjoy teaching the introductory language courses. The students bring so much enthusiasm to the classroom, and what they accomplish in 12 weeks is phenomenal.

What is important about your research?

I do historical work but my research questions are always informed by contemporary society. I look at the Enlightenment origins of democratic thought, religious tolerance, gender equality, and progressive pedagogy.

What should people know about you?

I am an optimist, through and through. Enlightenment thought speaks to me because I believe that human beings are capable of using reason and imagination to improve society. As a university instructor, I hope I get to play just a small role in that process.

Education

PhD (Queen’s University)
MA (Mannheim University)
BA (McGill University)

Selected Publications

Speltz, Andrea. “How to Read: Lessons from Christoph Martin Wieland’s ShandeanTurn in Der Neue Amadis.” Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 111.1 (2019).

Speltz, Andrea. “Hands off Herder: The New Right’s Appropriation of an Eighteenth-Century Cultural Theorist.” Publications of the English Goethe Society 87.2 (2018).

Speltz, Andrea. “Educating the Deistic Imagination in Rousseau’s Emile and Wieland’s Agathon.” Polytheismus der Einbildungskraft. Wechselspiele von Literatur und Religion von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Tomas Sommadossi. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann (2018).

Speltz, Andrea. “Internalizing Sexual Discipline: The Role of the Imagination in Rousseau’s Emile and Wieland’s Agathon.” Lessing Yearbook 45 (2017).

Speltz, Andrea. “War and Sentimentalism: Irony in Voltaire’s Candide, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 44 (2017).

Speltz, Andrea.“‘da doch einmal der Verstand der Held darinn ist’: Narrating Heroes in Goethe’s Novelle.” Die Macht des Erzählens. Ed. Winfried Eckel and Anja Müller-Wood. Remscheid: Gardez! (2017).

Speltz, Andrea. “Multiperspectivism in Christoph Martin Wieland’s Cyrus.” Lessing Yearbook 42 (2015).

Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 335 (2017).

Speltz, Andrea and Mueller, Ruediger. “‘Arbeiten, als sei nichts geschehen’: Ideologies of Work in Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns.” German as a foreign language. Ed. Martina Moeller (2013).

Speltz, Andrea. “Daphne’s Desires: Polyperspectivity and Female Happiness in Wieland’s Agathon, La Roche’s Fräuleins von Sternheim and Lessing’s Emilia Galotti.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 42 (2011).