Overview
Mari Jarris is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies. 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, transnational socialisms, utopian literature, Marxist aesthetics, and Critical Theory. They have previously taught courses in German Literature and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Middlebury’s German School, South Woods State Prison in New Jersey, and Princeton University.
Jarris’s current book manuscript, 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 polyamory, androgyny, family abolition, and the socialization of care. Together with Dorothea Walzer, they are also editing and translating the first English-language collection of Lu Märten’s writings, Classless Forms: A Lu Märten Reader.
Office Hours
T 1:30-2:30 pm & by appointment
Research Focus
- 19th- and 20th-Century German- and Russian-Language Literature
- Socialisms and Marxisms
- Feminist and Queer Theory
- Utopianism
- Critical Theory
Publications
"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.
(trans.) Walzer, Dorothea. “Marx as a Model and Question: Alexander Kluge’s Critical Inquires,” New German Critique, vol. 47, no. 1 (February 2020), 25-56.
(trans.) Fore, Devin. “‘Aktueller Realismus.’ Sowjetische Faktographie und die Noetik der Zeitung.” Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus, Wilhelm Fink Verlag (2018), 193-211.
