DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Frederika Tevebring received her PhD in Comparative Literary Studies with home department in Classics from Northwestern in 2017. Before coming to Northwestern she received a M.A. in Religious Studies and a B.A. in Ancient Studies from Freie Universität in Berlin. Her research and teaching interests include tragedy, mythology, reception of antiquity, nineteenth-century German literature, history of archaeology and the museum, and history of sexuality.

Her work explores the ways that Ancient Greece was reconstructed in scholarship, literature, and museums in nineteenth century Germany. She is particularly interested in figures from Greek mythology perceived as obscene or indecent and how they have troubled idealizing notions of Ancient Greece. Her dissertation considers one such figure, Baubo, who is associated with the act of exposing herself to the goddess Demeter. Her work has been supported by the SSRC’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence Max-Planck, and The Swedish Research Institute at Istanbul. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on her dissertation and researching her next project, on reconstructions of ancient matriarchies in German speaking literature.