Colloquium: Maxi Obexer

Please join us for this colloquium presentation by Maxi Obexer (currently Writer-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). Obexer is one of the leading contemporary German-language writers and playwrights whose work explores the intersections of language, power, and political imagination. She will read excerpts from her novel Unter Tieren und her essay collection Odysseus’ Hund with a discussion to follow. In-Person.

Bio:

Raised in South Tyrol and now based in Berlin, Obexer studied General and Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Theatre Studies in Berlin. Her plays and radio dramas received major awards while she was still a student. Among the numerous honors she has received are the Robert Geisendörfer Prize, the Eurodram Prize for Illegale Helfer (2016), and the Potsdam Theater Prize for Gehen und Bleiben (2016). Her novel Europas längster Sommer (2017) was nominated for the Bachmann Prize, and her radio play Im Auge des Sturms (2024) about the storm of the Capitol in Washington D.C. in 2021 was awarded radio play of the year. She has held fellowships from the Literary Colloquium Berlin, the Berlin Academy of Arts, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where she now serves on the Board of Trustees.

Since 2009, Obexer has taught regularly as a visiting professor at universities in the United States, including Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, and the University of New Mexico. In Fall 2026, she will spend two months as the Max Kade Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has also been a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and teaches regularly at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. In 2014, she co-founded the New Institute for Dramatic Writing (NIDS) with Sasha Marianna Salzmann. A year later, she established the South Tyrol Summer School, a program dedicated to mentoring emerging playwrights. In 2022, she and Josef Haslinger served as interim co-presidents of PEN Center Germany. She was awarded the Alice Salomon Poetics Prize in 2023.

Obexer’s work investigates the ways language shapes structures of power, belonging, and exclusion from a distinctly feminist perspective. Her writing engages with migration and displacement, competing visions of Europe, and the rights of marginalized communities—particularly queer people, women, and animals. Her more recent work has turned increasingly toward the relationship between humans and animals. The novel Unter Tieren (2023) and the essay collection Odysseus’ Hund – Erzählungen von der gegenseitigen Zähmung (2024) seek a language capable of recognizing animals as subjects rather than objects of human thought. The radio play Koloniale Arten (2026), which you can listen to online (https://www.ndr.de/kultur/epg/Hoerspiel,sendung-1050788.html), traces the enduring legacies of colonial violence, while the play Die Töchter der Orestie (2026) reconsiders the foundations of Western democracy by exposing the patriarchal structures embedded within its founding narratives.