Benes publishes In Babel's Shadow| June 16, 2009 Assistant
Professor Kveta Benes has published her first book, called In
Babel's Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in
Nineteenth-Century Germany. The book is part of the series
Kritik, published by Wayne State University Press. Here is the
book's descriptive blurb: "In contrast to fields like
anthropology, the history of linguistics has received remarkably
little attention outside of its own discipline despite the
undeniable impact language study has had on the modern period.
In Babel’s Shadow situates German language scholarship in
relation to European nationalism, nineteenth-century notions of
race and ethnicity, the methodologies of humanistic inquiry, and
debates over the interpretation of scripture. Author Tuska Benes
investigates how the German nation came to be defined as a
linguistic community and argues that the “linguistic turn” in
today’s social sciences and humanities can be traced to the late
eighteenth century, emerging within a German tr