Jan Knobloch
Visting Scholar
Jan Knobloch is a scholar of Romance and comparative literatures at the University of Cologne. His work focuses on France and Latin America and engages with philosophy, Critical Future Studies, and the Environmental Humanities, spanning the contemporary period as well as the 19th and 20th centuries. In his first book, Löschen und imaginieren. Paradigmatische Formen ästhetischer Negativität in der Moderne (Brill/Fink, 2022), he develops a new conceptualization of aesthetic negativity, tracing its theories and practices across the 19th and 20th centuries. Jan's second book project examines the disappearance of the future in the 21st century and how contemporary speculative fiction from France and Argentina counters it – in part by adopting a semi-peripheral stance and avoiding certain pitfalls of genre that confined much 20th-century SF to visions of the end. He has edited three collected volumes, and his articles have appeared in journals including Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, Romanische Forschungen, Lendemains, Musil-Forum, German Life and Letters, Chiricú, Trajectoires, and PhiN, as well as in numerous edited volumes. In 2026/27, he is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center (City University of New York) and at Northwestern University, Chicago, supported by a Feodor Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Together with Bieke Willem, Karen Struve, and Matthias Hausmann, he is co-editor of the book series Imaginarios del futuro / Imaginaires du futur at De Gruyter (forthcoming at the end of 2026). The series is dedicated to the distinct traditions of reflection and speculation on futures beyond the Anglophone world.