Marcel Knöchelmann

Marcel Knöchelmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. His work focusses on the intersection of literature, solidarity, and democracy. In his postdoctoral project, funded by the German Research Foundation through the Walter Benjamin Programme, Marcel studies cultural intermediation in contemporary literary production in the US. What is the role of art—and literature in particular—in the forming and reproduction of democratic society? How do intermediaries such as editors, critics, or jury board members draw on the civil sphere to legitimate or justify their decisions? Marcel combines Civil Sphere Theory with aesthetic theory for answering these questions.

Marcel received his PhD from University College London in 2021 with a sociology of authorship and publishing in the humanities and the Geisteswissenschaften, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. His first book is in publication with Cambridge University Press. He engages critically in the discourse on open access and advises research institutions on changing scholarly practices. Marcel is a trained bookseller. (Postdoctoral Fellow - March, 2023 to March, 2024).