Dr Katja Haustein

Katja specializes in modern German, French and comparative literature and has a particular interest in visual culture, the history of ideas, ethics and aesthetics. Before joining the University of Kent, she studied comparative literature, German literature and history in Berlin, London, Paris and Cambridge. She was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Cambridge, a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and a Visiting Scholar at the German Institute in Rome. As part of her wider commitment to public engagement in the humanities, she collaborates with independent publishing houses and writes reviews for various journals and magazines including The Times Literary Supplement.

Katja has published on twentieth-century autobiography and visual culture, including Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012/2020); on conceptions of space and the theory of myths in modern French literature and thought; on the intellectual histories of empathy, tact, and pity; and on the cultural history of mother’s milk and love in Germany and France.

In her latest book, Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters (Cambridge University Press, 2023),  Katja looks at tact as an intuitive and creative mode of negotiating the appropriate distance between people. Departing from conventional debates that associate intimacy with affection and distance with alienation, she shows how tact becomes significant in times of crisis, when established codes of sociability disintegrate, and new modes of communication must be found. In a series of reading encounters with key authors and filmmakers (incl. Goethe, Proust, Plessner, Adorno, Truffaut and Barthes), she reconsiders how we engage with other people, (moving) images, artworks, and texts, and gauges the significance of tact in our time. The book has been described as ‘a timely, intriguing examination of the inherent value in distanced contemplation and attentiveness’ (Times Literary Supplement), ‘a lively exercise in the practice of tact’ (Modern Language Review), ‘elegantly erudite’ and ‘persuasive’ (Los Angeles Review of Books), ‘challenging and revealing’ (Barthes Studies), and ‘admirably clever’ (Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie).

In her next book project, On Being Single, Katja responds to recent sociological and philosophical research, notably by Andreas Reckwitz, Samuel Weber and Charles Taylor. She traces notions of singularity and authenticity in German, French and English literature and thought from the Enlightenment to the digital age, with the aim to reconstruct the transformation of singularity from an anti-societal mode of individual resistance to a wide-spread social expectation.

Katja also continues to work on tact in two new and closely related research projects. In the first project she uses the idea of tact to intervene into the ongoing transdisciplinary debate about the ethical reorganization of human/non-human relations in the context of climate crisis. She explores how a theory of tact could be mobilised for the development of a theory of care, and how this theory might be used to inform and transform the practices of care in a human and post-human context, reshaping our relations with animals and the natural world. In the second project Katja looks at tact in the digital age. She is interested in how digital spaces and practices produce new pathways for tactful behaviour in everyday life, and how they transform our experience and understanding of touch. She discusses if large-language models such as AI have a capacity for tact, and asks what that means for the social choreographies they shape.

Funding

Katja’s research has been funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Studies Association, the Society for French Studies, the AHRC, the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust, and the Leverhulme Trust.