Jacob Haubenreich’s scholarship explores the intersections of materiality and meaning in the production and reception of literary works. While focusing on the long 20^th century, his research and areas of expertise are tied less to particular historical periods than to broader conceptual issues and theoretical questions—of materiality, mediality, visuality, textual production and reception, and the interrelationship between the hermeneutic and non-hermeneutic—that span historical periods, contexts, and configurations. Haubenreich’s work is rooted in extensive archival analysis and draws on a range of posthermeneutic approaches as well as textual criticism (critique génétique, critical bibliography, book history). Bringing these perspectives to bear on close readings of texts and the processes of their production and reception, he shows how drawing the materiality of texts into the scope of interpretative analysis has the potential to expand our understanding of the material-semiotic complexity of literature as an art form.

Haubenreich’s book, Textual Entanglements: Rilke, Handke, Bernhard and the Materiality of Literature (Cornell University Press, 2025) argues that material production processes manifest themselves in the published forms of writers’ works to such a degree that we cannot fully understand semantic dynamics without considering material scenes of production. For all three writers, traces of writing haunt their published texts: printed annotations indicating that certain passages were “im Manuskript an den Rand geschrieben” (Rilke); hand-sketched drawings and notes from wanderings reproduced in printed texts (Handke); fanatically regularized typographic text layouts whose rhythmic and semantic breaks nevertheless betray the writer’s composition in short typewritten episodes (Bernhard).

Haubenreich has also begun work on a second monograph entitled Experiments in Editioning. Whereas Textual Entanglements deals with experimental writing techniques, Experiments in Editioning focuses on literature since the 1960s for which the form of the book itself is an essential component of the work. It takes as its basic premise that literary works do not exist as singular, stable objects; rather, they exist across multiple material instantiations — editions, versions, anthologies, artist books, typographical experiments. The book explores how different  manifestations of literary works actively shape meaning in ways we sometimes acknowledge theoretically but rarely take seriously in interpretive or critical practice — making the case that these manifestations are themselves interpretations, as intellectually valid as scholarly commentary.

Haubenreich regularly pursues archival research at institutions in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria: the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach), the Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv (Bern), the Literaturarchiv der ÖsterreichischenNationalbibliothek (Vienna), and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna). He has held positions as Visiting Scholar at the ÖAW and in the Forschungsverbund Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel. His research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the DLA Marbach, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Österreichischer Austauschdienst (Franz Werfel Stipendium), and the Rare Book School.

Haubenreich received his PhD in German from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, he held the position of Associate Professor of German at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Recent Graduate Courses

Scenes of Writing

Materiality of German Literature: The Long 20th-Century

Hermeneutics/Posthermeneutics

Recent Undergraduate Courses

Experimental Literature: from Dada to Digital

Texte sehen, Bilder lesen: Literature and the Visual Arts

Viennese Modernism

Literary Multilingualism

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking World

The Zero Hour