Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include Continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology and existentialism, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, cognitive literary theory, poetics, philosophy of imagination, modernism, especially modern German literature, and literary ecology. She has previously taught in modern languages departments in the UK (Oxford and Birmingham, at the latter of which she was Chair and Professor of German and Comparative Literature) and was Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She received a DPhil in German and MSt in European Literature from Oxford; MA and PhD in Philosophy from Villanova; and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. For 2023, she has been appointed Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Gosetti-Ferencei’s research has included books on existentialism, on the philosophy of imagination, on the construction of the exotic in German modernism, on the relationship between the quotidian or everyday experience and ecstatic reflection in phenomenology, modern art and literature, and a critical reading of poetics in Heidegger and Hölderlin. Her work explores the boundaries between philosophy and literature, poetic experience and cognition, and in addition to Hölderlin her work has engaged the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many other modernist writers. Her work in aesthetics has engaged the visual art of Paul Cézanne, Cy Twombly, Giorgio Morandi, Alfred Kubin, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer. Her book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, won The Paris Review Prize. In On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), Gosetti-Ferencei presents a new interpretation of existentialist thought and literature, exploring, beyond the existentialism of the French phenomenologists, its historical origins in nineteenth century German, Danish, and Russian thought, contributions to existentialism of African-American thinkers, and its relevance for the social and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. Gosetti-Ferencei’s previous book, The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (Columbia University Press, 2018), is grounded in philosophy and a range of other disciplines, including cognitive theory, evolutionary anthropology, aesthetics and literary theory, and offers a new theory of imagination as both emerging from the wider cognitive ecology of our embodied life and engagement with the world, and affording its transformation and transcendence. In contrast to a long tradition of philosophy that sequestered imagination from cognition proper, in this work Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates how imagination must be understood as multimodal, shaping our ordinary experience and affording the heightened manifestations of creativity in scientific discovery and artistic and literary creation. Among other accomplishments of the book is the development of an understanding of cognitive play (drawing from Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Husserl), which show how creativity affords ‘situated transcendence.’ and in so doing both relies upon, and diverges from, the operations of ordinary thinking. This expansive and probing account of imagination demonstrates its reach across human experience and its crucial role in shaping and transforming our relationship to the world. Previous works include Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press 2011), in which Gosetti-Ferencei illuminates the construction of the ‘exotic’ in modern German literature. The rendering of spaces projected as exotic is shown to situate examination of the modern self and its relation to a foreign other, sometimes exploiting, otherwise destabilizing, colonialist or Eurocentric assumptions. She engages prose works of Hofmannsthal, Dauthendey, Hesse, Benn, Brecht, Ku