Preetham Sridharan
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Oregon
Links:
History 302 Syllabus for Summer 2024
History 302 Summer Course Poster (Nineteenth-Century Europe)
Film list about nineteenth-century Europe
My name is Preetham Sridharan and I am an intellectual historian and a PhD candidate, focusing on German and European history at the University of Oregon. I am originally from India and I completed my schooling there, before starting my university education in the U.S. I began to focus on modern German history out of my interest in getting to know other cultures and their histories. I have a master’s degree in history from Portland State University, which I completed in 2018.
My research area involves the history of theological and linguistic thought in nineteenth-century Germany, and how various modern ideas about the mutual influence between language and thought came to be developed there while also being influenced by theological ideas and Biblical philology. My methodological approach concentrates on this intersection between faith and ideas of God and intellectual history. I particularly work on the relevance of the idea of “improvement” for language and religion in the intellectual history of this period. I am focusing my dissertation on German Romantic thinkers (such as Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher) and their normative theories about perfectibility and improvements in language through poetry, situating them in the longue durée of projects to improve languages, including seventeenth-century attempts at philosophical languages, Enlightenment theories of standardising languages, and modern constructed languages like Esperanto. Romantic theories of divinity emphasised the interconnected oneness of all reality that poetic and sensual language could relate to. This forms a key area of my project to study how German theological ideas evolved over time.
My language proficiency includes English, German, Tamil, and some French. I am presently a GE in history at the University of Oregon, and have also had experience as a language teacher in both German and English as a second language. I also have a bachelor’s degree in financial economics and accounting, and have much interest in exploring interdisciplinary connections. I am presently looking for full-time employment after finishing my PhD dissertation.
Preetham Sridharan's website 