Xuxu Song

Xuxu Song’s research and teaching interests center on eighteenth- to twentieth-century German literature and its imbrication with intellectual history, European studies, public policy, second language acquisition, and most recently, the intersection of environmental studies, translation, migration studies in the context of (de)globalization, women’s studies, and the history of science and economic thought. Her dissertation, “A Study of the Athenaeum (1798-1800) as the Early German Romantic Work of Art,” demonstrates that the multi-year, multi-volume, and multi-authored journal is in its own right the paradigmatic artwork of the Jena constellation. Xuxu approaches the journal holistically against the backdrop of the aesthetics of its sociable polyvocality, exploring its full diversity of texts and genres as a polyphonic, interdisciplinary and transcultural work of Symphilosophie/Sympoesie. 

Her work is largely motivated by the interest in breaking the barriers between and bringing into dialogue “major/canonical” and “minor/lesser-known” voices in various kinds of German context. Her current research focuses on the question of how noncanonical and marginalized voices in early Romanticism in Jena and Berlin de facto dynamized the scene of intellectual exchange and co-shaped its central aesthetics in ways that are relevant for crucial discussions of global concern of our day. A second project expands on her recent work theorizing translation in both a literal and metaphorized sense vis-à-vis issues around borders, memory, and inequalities. Xuxu approaches translation as an unstable and situational act of re-bordering and a space opened up for uncertainties and chaos, which in turn, via the early Romantics, leads to creativity and productivity. More than a series of thematically grouped close readings, her case studies ask the same guiding questions of how “translation changes everything,” to use Venuti’s phrase, and how (under)representations of disadvantaged, unequal experiences in juxtaposition with the dominant and hegemonic can be understood via translation. 

Prior to joining the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia, Xuxu taught German at Princeton University after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, in 2022. She was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellowship and the DAAD doctoral research fellowship that funded her research stay in Mannheim and Frankfurt. She previously studied German at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and Renmin University of China. She holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Southern California. She has interpreted for intergovernmental conferences in Vienna, Bern, Florence, and Los Angeles; her translations have been published in Telos. Xuxu currently serves on the 2025 MLA Forum Executive Committee, Literatures, Languages, and Cultures: 18^th- and Early-19^th-Century German.