Profile

Tanvi Solanki is an Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s  Underwood International College in Seoul, South Korea. Her work seeks to relate practices and concepts of what she calls  ‘listening to difference’ with the history of philology, the university, anthropology, language politics, and migration. Her research on sound, voice, listening and culture emerged from her dissertation, “Reading as Listening: The Birth of Cultural Acoustics 1744-1802,” about the works of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and the intellectual landscape around him in the 'long eighteenth-century,' with its profound investment, often conflicted, in the world of Ancient Greece and Rome. She received her Ph.D. at Princeton University's Department of German and her B.A.with high honors in Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She spent two years at Cornell University as a Stanford H. Taylor Postdoctoral Associate prior to her arrival at Yonsei University in 2018. She has been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute of History of Science, University of Konstanz, and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has published in a number of peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes including History of European Ideas, Classical Receptions Journal, Germanic Review and German Studies Review and has presented her work in a variety of international, interdisciplinary venues.