Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
English Literature

External Senior Fellow
October 2018 – July 2019

Last Update: 31.08.2019

Curriculum Vitae

Sandro Jung is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and has held posts and visiting professorships at the Universities of Salford, Ghent, Göteborg, and Hunan. Most recently, he has been the recipient of a senior fellowship funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, as part of which he was hosted by the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel where he curated a major exhibition on eighteenth-century literary book illustration, “Kleine artige Kupfer.” His research has generously been supported by fellowships awarded, among others, by the American Antiquarian Society, Dumbarton Oaks, the Forschungszentrum Gotha, the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, the Houghton Library, Harvard, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Princeton University Library, and the University of Strasbourg’s USIAS. He previously held a Junior EURIAS Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. His primary areas of scholarly interest are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British (and German) literature, historical media studies, book history, and the centrality of illustration studies within the discipline of literary studies. He is a Past President of the East-Central American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, the General Editor of the Lehigh UP series “Studies in Text and Print Culture,” and the Editor of the Taylor & Francis journal, ANQ.

Selected Publications

Kleine artige Kupfer: Buchillustration im 18. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018).
The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760-1825 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2017).
Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2015).
The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-Century Uses of an Experimental Mode (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2009).
David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Patronage and Politics in the Age of Union (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008).

FRIAS Project

Transnational Literary History, Eighteenth-Century Book Illustration, and the Genre of the robinsonade

Contributing to the transnational mapping of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the genre of the robinsonade, the project aims to recover the significance of the book illustrations and other paratexts (especially translators’ or authors’ prefaces) that accompanied the project corpus of 172 editions of 18th-century robinsonades published in English, French, Italian, and German. It will include translations of Robinson Crusoe and other robinsonades, and aim to produce an account of the European history of the robinsonade that draws on book-historical analysis and reception studies in order to establish that the genre was defined not only by the novels themselves but also by their illustrations. Methodologically, the project combines the systematic, diachronic study of hitherto unstudied 18th-century literary book illustrations with the transnational examination of a pervasive literary genre the most prominent example of which—despite being recognised as an example of world literature—has still not been comprehensively mapped in terms of its transnational iterations and impact. It is ground-breaking in its use of book illustrations as part of genre theorization, especially as it advocates that 18th-century reading experience was affected as much by readers’ visual literacy and by recall of intertextually associated illustrations as by the reading of the typographic text itself