As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley since 2015, Landon is pursuing a concurrent PhD in German and Medieval Studies. He is currently a Fulbright Research Fellow pursuing dissertation research at the University of Cologne. He was a DAAD research grant recipient in 2018 at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. Landon received his MA in German Studies from UC Berkeley in 2016, where he also received a New Directions in Theology grant in 2016-17 and was a fellow at the Institute of European Studies, 2015-16. He received his BA in English, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Classics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, where he was an Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellow in 2010-11.
Research Areas
Literary representations of reading (Leseszene)
medieval mysticism
medieval epic narration
Medievalism
migration narratives
history of German Studies in the US
Research Project
"The Body and the Book: The Poetics of Reading in German Literature" investigates the recurring depiction of readers and reading in German literature. This diachronic study juxtaposes ‘scenes of reading’ — fictional portrayals of processes or acts of reading — to reveal the often overlooked poetological power of reading as a social and cultural process that can frame political, historical, and religious issues. Informed by the history of reading and literacy, codicology, and historical theories of cognition and perception, this project reconstructs reading scenes as offering hermeneutic richness, theoretical density, and social analysis. This project proposes poetics of reading as a third way to analyze reading, complementing histories of reading and reader-response theories while it questions the ideological underpinnings of our contemporary textual consumption and interpretation practices.
Publications (Selection)
“‘Meine eigene Geschichte’: Identity Construction through Reading in Abbas Khider’s Der falsche Inder.” TRANSIT Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 2021. Forthcoming in Spring 2021.
With Lilla Balint, “Migration meets Bildung: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone.” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature. Forthcoming in Fall 2021.
“Sensuous Reading in the Legatus divinae pietatis.” In Sensing the Middle Ages. Sense, Matter, and Medium. New Approaches to Medieval Literary and Material Culture, edited by Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey, Walter de Gruyter, 2021. Forthcoming.
