Xuxu Song

Dr. Song’s research and teaching interests center on German thought from the sixteenth century to the present. She works at the intersection of German studies with political and legal theory, environmental studies, public policy, migration, and the history of science and economic thought. 

Her work is motivated by a commitment to bridging “major,” canonical voices and “minor,” lesser-known perspectives across diverse German-speaking contexts, continually asking whose knowledge counts. She is particularly interested in dialogues between German intellectual history and interconnected global issues today, including environmental justice, migration, and the rule of law. Drawing on critical posthumanism, new materialisms, and applied linguistics, a current project uses relational frameworks to rethink knowledge, language studies, and human development in the context of the contemporary polycrisis. Her dissertation, “A Study of the Athenaeum (1798-1800) as the Early German Romantic Work of Art,” examines this multi-year, multi-volume, and multi-authored journal in its own right as the paradigmatic work of art of the Jena Romantic constellation through Sympoesie and Symphilosophie.

Prior to joining the faculty of Department of Germanic Languages in Fall 2024, she taught in the Department of German at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California, Irvine, following a research stay as a DAAD Doctoral Research Fellow in Frankfurt and Mannheim, and was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellowship. She studied German and Public Administration at the University of Southern California, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and Renmin University of China. She has interpreted for intergovernmental meetings in Vienna, Bern, Florence, and Los Angeles, and translated on World War II and contemporary political theory. 

Outside the Department of Germanic Languages, she currently serves on the executive committee of the Modern Language Association forum Literatures, Languages, and Cultures: 18th- and Early-19th-Century German. She is also an amateur eventing rider and member of the United States Eventing Association (USEA).