Chloe

Vaughn

Research Interests

My research focuses on concepts of collective identification and belonging in the German-language literature and philosophy of the long nineteenth century. My first book project, tentatively titled Imagining Beyond the Community: The Creation of the Volk in the Long 19th Century, examines how German authors from that period, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach and Thomas Mann, attempted to expand the contemporaneous reading public by shaping the reading practices of audiences traditionally ignored by the typical belletristic literary world. The authors I investigate, I argue, envisioned concepts of the Volk, the Volkstümliche (the popular or folkish) and later the Nation that rejected jingoism and were compatible with cosmopolitanism, in part by effacing distinctions between “popular” and “high” literature. This project aims to address a gap in scholarship on the period by centering Volk as one of the operative concepts of the era and one deeply contested by actors across the political spectrum.  I also seek to complicate prevailing ideas about nationalism by focusing on literary projects that take seriously the Volk as co-producers of culture, not simply as a passive mass to be cynically exploited by nationalist demagogues.

I am also interested in the reception of German literature and philosophy from the long nineteenth century by Black American thinkers, most prominently W.E.B. DuBois. I am currently investigating his efforts, influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder and Richard Wagner, to create a canon of Black folk songs, and argue that Du Bois draws on Herder’s national-literary ambitions to conceive of Black America as a folk unto itself, with its own high culture and literature.

Selected Recent Publications

“Die Partei der Blumen und Nachtigallen”: Heine and Herder Between National and World Literature” in The Germanic Review, Vol. 98, Issue 1 (2023), pp. 18-32. 

“Das Volk dichten: Herder’s Volksbegriff as a case for the metaphorical in conceptual history” in Concepts of Culture, Berghahn Books (Forthcoming 2026).

“Galactic Dialectics: Appropriation of Star Trek by the Political Right and Left” in 60 Years of Star Trek: Influence and Impact (Forthcoming 2026)