Dr. Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies and Director of Graduate Studies for the MA and PhD programs in Transcultural German Studies, including the dual PhD/Dr. phil. degree program with the Universities of Leipzig and Cologne in Germany. She is affiliated faculty at the Arizona Institutes for Resilience: Solutions for the Environment and Society, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program on Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. After earning her Ph.D. in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, she held a postdoctoral position as Humanities Teaching Scholar there. Prior to coming to the US from Germany, she studied at the Universities of Bonn, St. Andrews, and the Freie Universität Berlin to receive her M.A. in German and English Philology.
Dr. Jacobs' research focuses on 19th-21st century German literature and film, Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Jewish Studies, the History of Sexuality, and the History of Science. Current books include the monograph Animal, Vegetal Marginal: The German Literary Grotesque from Panizza to Kafka (Indiana University Press, 2025, see below), Plant Poetics: The Literary Forms and Functions of the Vegetal (Brill, 2025, co-edited with Isabel Kranz and Solvejg Nitzke), and Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-Matter (punctum books, 2023, co-edited with Agnes Malinowska), in addition to several journal special issues (on the literary lives of plants, animal narratology, third-generation memory literature, and the author Oskar Panizza) as well as a forthcoming Metzler Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch on plants (co-edited with Isabel Kranz). She has published articles on topics as different as monstrosity, literary censorship, biopolitics, asexual ecologies, pollen, roses, plant exhibits, animal epistemology, zoopoetics, Nazi rabbit breeding, and German/Jewish/American graphic novels (for more information about publications, see here). In the Environmental Humanities, she has written several pieces about environmental education initiatives for refugees and asylum seekers in Germany, showing how a specific cultural understanding of environmentalism is instrumentalized for "integration." In Plant Studies, she working widely on phytopoetics, the way plants shape literary writing and cultural currents, with a specific focus on vegetal eroticism and violence. When it comes to animals, she has published on the tradition of the canine narrator, from Berganza to Doge. She co-founded the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network in 2016 and has facilitated it since.
On Animal, Vegetal, Marginal: Between the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s Reich, the genre of die Groteske, or the German literary grotesque, sold out cabarets, drew droves of radio listeners, and created bestsellers with its irreverent comedy and critique. At the same time, its authors were ruthlessly censored for their satire of society, leaving die Groteske virtually unknown today. As the first full-length study of the genre, Animal, Vegetal, Marginal recovers this short prose form, which draws on the perspectives of marginalized individuals, animals, and plants to challenge what it means to be human. Joela Jacobs traces the development of the genre and its variations from the work of Oskar Panizza, Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Salomo Friedlaender to Franz Kafka. Animal, Vegetal, Marginal shows how marginalized and nonhuman voices mounted resistance against the rise of the biopolitical structures underpinning nationalism, racism, and antisemitism in the decades leading up to the Second World War.
Dr. Jacobs enjoys being in the classroom, both to teach the intricacies of German literature and language and to explore interdisciplinary connections surrounding fundamental questions about life and living beings with students. She has taught a wide range of courses on all levels of the German college curriculum and in adult & general education on topics such as German environmentalism, transatlantic perspectives on national trauma, (a)typical emotions in poetry, zombies, monsters, and fairy tales, Kafka's oeuvre, expressionist film, romanticism, and German Jewish literature. As a certified Teaching Consultant, she is always interested in talking pedagogy and classroom technology. In 2019, she received the College of Humanities Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2020, she was honored with the University of Arizona Foundation Leicester and Kathryn Sherrill Creative Teaching Award.