Therese Shire
Therese Shire earned an M.A. in Music Education at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna as well as in German Literature at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Vienna, before receiving her M.A. at Harvard.
She is highly interested in the workings of language, in metaphorology and music in literature, particularly in the verbalization of aural impressions. Her diploma thesis dealt with forms of musical description and was titled "Musik in Sprache gefasst. Formen der Musikbeschreibung bei E. T. A. Hoffmann".
Other research interest of hers are corporeal topics (with H. v. Kleist’s and Verena Stefan’s œuvre as specialized fields) and canon formation in literature and music, especially regarding the female participation within. She is mostly drawn to literature of the 18th and 19th century, fin-de-siècle Vienna, and German and Austrian literature between 1918-1945, with a special focus on exile literature. She frequently works on female authors and composers of these periods such as Sophie Mereau-Brentano, Corona Schröter, Dorothea Schlegel, Louise Aston, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Johanna Beyer, and El Hor.
Before coming to Harvard, she taught at the University of Karlsruhe and at Rutgers University, NJ, as a German language instructor.
Since 2013, Therese worked as a pianist, director and performance artist under the artist’s name Cafasso. As a member of the music theater ensemble Schlüterwerke, she researched as well as performed a variety of rare works.
Therese loves bringing academia and the arts together. She is the initiator of Ästhetische Teegesellschaft, a series of innovative artistic activities designed to foster creative energy and community. Therese also spearheaded the creation of an art installation in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department Jack M. Stein Library that highlighted the exclusion of women and authors of color from the German literary canon.
At Harvard, Therese is working on forgotten or yet undiscovered works of writers and composers, especially those afflicted by emigration or suppressed. Her dissertation deals with the (re)definition of modernism and the oeuvres of Mela Hartwig, Maria Lazar, and Veza Canetti.