Overview
Mari Jarris is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies and affiliated faculty in the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Trained as a comparatist, they work across German- and Russian-language literature and theory, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their research areas include feminist and queer theory, Marxism and anarchism, utopian literature, psychoanalysis, and Critical Theory. They have previously taught at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Middlebury’s German School, South Woods State Prison in New Jersey, and Princeton University.
Jarris’s first book, Utopia as Revolution: Marxism’s Queer Pasts and Futures, posits that utopia has been a site for theorizing queerness and revolution since the nineteenth century. It offers a counternarrative to the dominance of scientific socialism by recovering queer utopias within transnational German, Russian, and French socialist movements. Utopia as Revolution argues for expanding the Marxist archive to include visions of collectively produced abundance through family abolition, comradely love, and the socialization of care. Jarris's second book project, The Other International: Marxism, Anarchism, and Feminism in Revolutionary Switzerland, proposes a theory of revolutionary practice derived from anarcho-communist movements on the fringes of the First and Second Internationals. Their article, “Forms of the Mother Right: Marxism's Matriarchal Origins from Friedrich Engels to Lu Märten,” was awarded the Women in German Best Article Prize in 2025. Previous research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, American Councils, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Women in German Coalition.
Together with Dorothea Walzer, Jarris is editing and translating the first English-language collection of Lu Märten’s writings, Classless Forms: A Lu Märten Reader (Cornell University Press). They co-organize the Marxism Working Group and serve on the editorial board of Diacritics, Signale, and New German Critique.
Office Hours
TBA & by appointment
Research Focus
- 19th- and 20th-Century German- and Russian-Language Literature
- Marxism and Anarchism
- Feminist and Queer Theory
- Utopian Literature and Science Fiction
- Critical Theory
Publications
“Nature Against the Law: A Genealogy of Queer Speeches,” in: Kyle Frackman and Douglas Pretsell (eds.), Queer Possibility in the Late Nineteenth Century: The World Around Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, University of Toronto Press (forthcoming).
“Forms of the Mother Right: Marxism's Matriarchal Origins from Friedrich Engels to Lu Märten,” The German Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 4 (Fall 2024), 472-489.
“Precarity and Form: Lu Märten’s Intervention in the Worker’s Autobiography,” in: Sophie Duvernoy, Karsten Olson, and Ulrich Plass (eds.), Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film, Bloomsbury Press (2023), 141-164.
“Utopie des Alltags. Formen der Zukunft in den Schriften Lu Märtens,” in: Vanessa Briese, Christopher Busch, Stefan Geyer, Alexander Kling and Tímea Mészáros (eds.), Alltag! Literaturgeschichte eines Theoriereservoirs seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, Wehrhahn Verlag (2023).
Co-authored with Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, “Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and the Prehistory of International Marxist Feminism,” Feminist German Studies, vol. 36, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2020), 162-192.
“Utopizm i gender v romane N.G. Chernyshevskogo «Chto delat’?»,” in: A.A. Demchenko (ed.), N. G. Chernyshevskii. Stat’i, issledovaniia i materialy: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, vol. 22, Izdatel’stvo Saratovskogo universiteta (2020), 51-56.
