About

Dr Antonia Hofstätter completed a BA in Humanities at the University of Brighton in 2008 and an MA in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex in 2010. She then returned to the University of Brighton to study for a PhD on Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics, where she also taught some courses in philosophy and cultural studies. After completing her PhD in 2017, Antonia remained at Brighton for another year as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics, and also spent some time translating German philosophy into English. At the beginning of 2019, she joined the German section at the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages, Finnish, Dutch, and German at Stockholm University, where she taught a variety of courses on German language, culture, and literature. Antonia joined the University of Warwick as a Teaching Fellow in January 2021.

Research interests

My research focuses primarily on critical and cultural theory, aesthetics, and political thought. I am particularly interested in the work of the early Frankfurt School, especially in the writings of T.W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Recently, I have been working on Adorno’s metaphysics of hope and its relationship to aesthetic experience; the significance of late style in art and music for his conception of critique; the enigmatic presence of several rhinoceroses in Adorno’s texts (and how they allow us to address the relationship between art and nature); and the contemporary relevance of his Aesthetic Theory. These themes share a common focus not only on illuminating the importance of aesthetics for strategies of critique, which has been a longstanding interest of mine, but also on exploring the ways in which critique enables us to rethink the relationship between nature and history. This latter aspect inspires my ongoing research, which explores how shifts in the experience of nature might pose a challenge to the ways in which we can perform critical theory today.

Publications

Book:

Hofstätter, Antonia and Steuer, Daniel (eds.). Adorno’s Rhinoceros: Art, Nature, Critique. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

Articles and Chapters: 

'J’Accuse.' Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 41 no. 2 (2022): 125–126.

'Introduction: The Enigma of the Rhinoceros.' In Adorno’s Rhinoceros: Art, Nature, Critique, edited by Antonia Hofstätter and Daniel Steuer, 1–18. London: Bloomsbury, 2022

'The Rhinoceros at the Bottom of the Sea: Adorno, Dürer, and the Silent Eloquence of Artworks.' In Adorno’s Rhinoceros: Art, Nature, Critique, edited by Antonia Hofstätter and Daniel Steuer, 43–56. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

'Rätselcharakter, Wahrheitsgehalt, Metaphysik.' In Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie, edited by Anne Eusterschulte and Sebastian Tränkle, 123–138. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.

'Falling Star and Rising Hope: Reading Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Today.' In The Aging of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, edited by Samir Gandesha, Johan Hartle, and Stefano Marino, 31–52. Turin: Mimesis Press, 2021.

'The Future of Critical Theory: A Conversation with Lydia Goehr, Helena Grass, Martin Jay, Douglas Kellner, Stefan Müller-Doohm, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein.' In Critical Theory: Past, Future, Present, edited by Anders Bartonek and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, 313–321. Stockholm: Södertörn University Press, 2021.

'Under the Skin of Modernity: The Subcutaneous.' In Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism, edited by Robin Truth Goodmann, 21­­–35. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

'Catastrophe and History: Adorno, the Anthropocene, and Beethoven’s Late Style,' Journal of the Adorno Studies Association, no. 3 (2019). Special Issue on Adorno and the Anthropocene, edited by Camilla Flodin and Anders S. Johansson: 1–19.

'Adorno’s Meditations on Metaphysics and Beethoven’s Late Style,' Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, no. 45/ 46 (Autumn 2018): 96–117.

'Adorno and Performance. Thinking with the Movement of Language.' In Adorno and Performance, edited by Karoline Gritzner and Will Daddario, 155–170. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Selected Translations:

Goehr, Lydia. 'Stimmigkeit und Sinn.' In Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie (Klassiker Auslegen), edited by Anne Eusterschulte and Sebastian Tränkle, translated by Antonia Hofstätter, 139–154, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.

Hogh, Philipp. Communication and Expression: Adorno's Philosophy of Language, translated by Antonia Hofstätter. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017.