Professor Tanvi Solanki
Tanvi Solanki is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature Yonsei University’s Underwood International College in Seoul, South Korea.
During 2024-2025 she will be Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. After receiving her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Princeton University, she was a Stanford H. Taylor Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. She has worked as Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Humboldt University, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London among other institutions. She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature and philosophy, with an approach informed by sound studies, media theory, classical reception studies, linguistic anthropology, aesthetics, and intellectual, disciplinary, and cultural history.
Her current project is about canonical formations and the politics of listening. Her case studies range from eighteenth-century sermons in Germany to the BBC’s Listening Project. Its starting point is an exploration of the concept and practice of ‘Listening to Difference,’ which emerged from her dissertation on the German polymath J.G.Herder: “Reading As Listening: The Birth of Cultural Acoustics.” While at Clare Hall, Solanki will investigate how German philologists’ frequently agonistic relation to listening to difference – temporal, racial, linguistic, cultural, geographical – play out in disciplinary formations in the humanities. She examines the work of German philologists such as the Schlegel brothers, J.G. Herder, Max Müller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and their sources for theorizing difference. These include their readings and translations of orally mediated works from antiquity such as the Homeric epics, the Hebrew Bible, the Sanskrit Vedas, and the Bhagavada Gita, as well as early modern ethnographic travel writings from missionaries, scientists, poets, and envoys about the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
Select publications
- Solanki, Tanvi. “The Multi-sensorial Ramayana and Its Migrant Afterlife in the Making of German Romanticism and Narendra Modi’s India,” in Special Issue: “Sensing Migrant Romanticism.” Comparative Literature 77.2 (2025), eds. Carlos Abreu Mendoza and Tanvi Solanki. Forthcoming.
- Solanki, Tanvi. “Who Sounds Most Worthy of Human Rights? Aural Cultural Diversity, the Concept of Humanity, and their Religious Investments in German Language Ideologies,” in Special Issue: “Endowed by their Creator: Human Rights and Religion in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” German Life and Letters 78.1 (2025) https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12431
- Solanki, Tanvi. “A Reading of Friedrich Kittler’s Reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Goldene Topf’ (The Golden Pot) in Aufschreibesysteme1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900)” in Special Issue: “Canonical Pressures: German Literature and its Voices of Difference.” Germanic Review 99.1 (2024): 49-62, eds. Willi Goetschel and Tanvi Solanki. https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2023.2299725
- Solanki, Tanvi. “Poesis, God, and the Connectedness of all Beings: Herder’s Comparative Method.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historique 50.1 (2024): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh.2024.500101
- Solanki, Tanvi. “Listening to the Cultural Acoustics of Migrant Voices: The Archived Conversations of the BBC and the British Library’s ‘Listening Project.’” European Journal of Cultural Studies 27.1 (2024): 17-35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549423119805
- Solanki, Tanvi. “Colonial Philology and its Erotic Imaginaries: Kalidasa’s Sakuntala in Germany.” In Gender and German Colonialism, eds. Elisabeth Krimmer and Chunjie Zhang, 207-225. London: Routledge, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003378990-14
- Solanki, Tanvi. “Listening to Difference: Herder’s Aural Theory of Cultural Diversity in ‘The Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772).” History of European Ideas 48.7 (2022): 930-947. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2022.2064603
- Solanki, Tanvi. “Aural Philology: Herder Hears Homer Singing.” Classical Receptions Journal 12.4 (2020): 401-424.
https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/claa007
Select Awards
- Yonsei University, Future-Leading Fund for New Faculty, 2018-2021.
- Cornell Society for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Interdisciplinary Writing Group Fellowship for “Cultural Acoustics,” 2017-2018.
- Princeton Center for Digital Humanities Seed Grant, June 2016.
- DAAD Graduate Research Scholarship, 2012-3.
Further links
CRASSH profile:
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/about/people/tanvi-solanki/
Academia.edu profile:
https://yonsei.academia.edu/TanviSolanki
Homepage:
www.TanviSolanki.com