Peter McIsaac

Peter M. McIsaac's scholarship and teaching takes place at three junctures: the intersections of modern German literature and culture and Museum Studies; the popular and sceintific impulses shaping public anatomy exhibition from 1850-present; and digital humanities approaches to nineteenth-century German periodicals. Among his publications are the books Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting (2007) and Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization (co-edited with Gabriele Mueller, 2015). He was a co-editor of a special issue of New German Critique on contemporary German literature (2003), and his articles have appeared in The German Quarterly, Monatshefte, Seminar, German Life and Letters, Literatur für Leser, and The International Journal of Cultural Policy. He serves on the editorial board of the multi-disciplinary journal imaginations. His most recent publication, “Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind: Science, the body, and Language in the Writings of Durs Grünbein and Thomas Hettche" (Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain, U Toronto P, 2016), examines how contemporary writers have turned to anatomy exhibitions as a way of thinking through contemporary problems in aesthetics and represetation. 

McIsaac is currently writing a book-length manuscript on the "secret" German pre-history to Body Worlds, a contemporary exhibition of human corpses that has broken attendance records and generated controversy around the world.

Since 2012, McIsaac has also been engaged in collaborative Digital Humanities project that uses computer-based approaches to analyze entire runs of mainstream nineteenth-century periodicals such as Deutsche Rundschau, Westermanns Illustrirte Monatshefte, Die Grenzboten, and Die Gartenlaube. McIsaac uses a variety of techniques including databases of index metadata and Latent Dirichlet Allocation and dynamic topic modeling as a means of gaining new insight into the most read material in nineteenth-century German culture. The first installment of this work appeared in the volume, Distant Readings: Topologies of German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (eds. Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin, 2014).

Additional work in progress focuses on the visual archive of Gottfried Benn's early poetry, shifts in German cultural policy resulting from EU integration and globalization, and the use of digital technologies in German-speaking galleries and museums.

At York and Duke Universities, McIsaac taught on a wide range of topics, including the history of the museum, science and technology in 19th- and 20th-century German literature and culture, 20th-century Berlin and Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. His innovative work with iPods and other instructional technologies was cited in Newsweek and University Business magazines in 2005. Likewise in 2005, he received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award from Trinity College of Duke University.

Before coming to Michigan, McIsaac served as the Director of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University.

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Affiliation(s)

• German Studies, Museum Studies

Award(s)

• Fellow, J.H. Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University [2007-2008]
• Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professorship, Duke University [2004-05]
• Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award, Trinity College of Duke University[2005]
• Randall and Barbara Smith Faculty Enrichment Award, Duke University, [2002]
• Fulbright Research Fellowship, USIA, Cologne, Germany [1990-1991]

Field(s) of Study

• Post-1750 German literature and culture
• Museum studies
• Digital Humanities
• Science and technology studies
• German film