James M. Kopf, PhD

Bio

James M. Kopf is thrilled to be the 2025-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Humanities Center at Texas Tech University, where he is working on environmental philosophy, romanticism, media theory, and the history of science with the material in the Sowell and Koger archival collections. Before this, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at Lehigh University, where in the fall of 2024, he served as Acting Program Head of German. He received his PhD in German Literature & Culture from Pennsylvania State University, where he remained for a year as the Max Kade postdoctoral fellow, though he has taught courses housed in or crosslisted with English, Comparative Literature, Global Studies, Film, and Jewish Studies programs.

His work has been published in Resonance, the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, and elsewhere, and his first book Phenomenology, Soundscape, Music: A Fragmentary System of Resonance and Echo is available through De Gruyter. Music critic and author, Harry Sword, called it “a depth charge sonic exploration.” James's research is principally engaged with the intersections of aesthetics, critical theory, phenomenology, and deconstruction. He is also interested in literature, psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy/ecocriticism, experimental music, and radical politics.

James is currently translating and preparing a critical edition of C. G. Carus's Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, with Daniel Purdy providing the afterword. However, he is also working on second planned book, which will analyze midcentury visual cultures in the shadow of modernism, particularly through the lens of the op art movement.

James loves nature, cooking, gardening, music, literature, and film. His favorite album (and prized vinyl possession) is La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano. He can't decide whether his favorite movie is Tarkovsky's Stalker or the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and he not-so-secretly desires to write a book on the latter.