I undertook primary and secondary research over the course of the fellowship, looking at Rahel Levin Varnhagen's philosophical writings in her notebooks. This resulted in a book chapter that is in press, and which I was invited to conribute by the editors. The work involved a thorough examination of Varnhagen's diaries and notes, the manuscripts of which are held in Krakow, but have been published as a critical edition with the academic publisher Wallstein, and so I was able to consult the published edition. I then surveyed the relevant secondary literature on Varnhagen, which focuses on her extensive correspondence, but less on the notes and aphorisms which, although published in part during her lifetime, have not been the subject of sustained scholarly attention. This allowed me to re-examine the primary material with contextual detail - on Varnhagen's reading preferences, her intellectual interests - and position her in the book chapter as an autodidactic and dialogic thinker, drawing some inspiration from the German Idealist tradition, but with a marked tendency towards metacritical concerns (how does philosophy work; should it be systematising or not). The resulting work is therefore a sustained survey of Varnhagen's philosophical engagement.
I also undertook archive work in Dessau-Roßlau on the papers of Friedrich von Matthisson, which proved so extensive as to necessitate a further visit: the papers in Dessau-Roßlau comprised some 1,000 letters, as well as diaries. In a three-week research stay, I was able to survey the letters and record them (to be transcribed from German cursive at a later date; simultaneous transcription would have made a survey of the material impossible in the time given), and I will return to read through the diaries in due course. I also consulted the archive of the Gleimhaus in Halberstadt, which includes letters between Matthisson and Ludwig Gleim, a prominent literary patron and poet of the eighteenth century. I also worked on invited papers on philosophical reviews in the eighteenth century, with a focus on Christian Garve, as well as the reception of the literary character Werther, sensibility, and masculinity in the nineteenth century. These will, in due course, be published as book chapters in edited volumes.
