Dr Frederika Tevebring

I received a BA in Ancient Studies and a MA in Religious History from the Freie Universität in Berlin and a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University, Chicago. Before coming to King’s, I was a research fellow at the Warburg Institute and taught at University of Surrey. 

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Classical Reception
• Gender Studies and History of Sexuality
• The History and Politics of Museums and Collecting
• German Intellectual History

My research investigates how the ancient past has been reconstructed in literature, museums, and scholarship since the 19th century. I am particularly interested in figures and tropes described as obscene or primitive that have challenged idealized notions of antiquity. My current book project discusses the modern afterlife of one such figure: the mythical Baubo.

My postdoctoral project - "Matriarchal Pasts and Modernist Futures" - explores how, in the first half of the twentieth century, the theory of a prehistoric matriarchy became a focal point for reimagining a shared European heritage amidst catastrophic political instability.

I am convener of the research group “Migrating Prehistories. Diffusion, Globalisation and the Origin of Cultures,” which explores the history and continued relevance of describing cultural change in terms of population movements, and of the reading group “Mythopolitics,” on the politicized interest in myth in the early twentieth century. Those interested in joining the latter are welcome to contact me.

Selected publications

• “Baubo, Truth, and Joyful Philology” The German Quarterly , 93, no. 3 (Summer 2020), 359-373
• Freud’s Archaeology: A Conversation between Excavation and Analysis special issue of American Imago 78, no 2 (2021) co-edited with Alexander Wolfson
• "Mythological Parallels and Visual Compulsions: The Matriarchal Subtext to Freud's Archaeology." American Imago78, no. 2 (2021), 275-305
• “Baubo on the Pig. Travel Across Disciplines” (p.124-130) Reading Objects in the Contact Zone. Eds.  Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Anna Sophia Messner and Kerstin Schankweiler. (Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality, 2021)

Expertise and public engagement

I have given public lectures and tours on the history of British and German museum collections from a postcolonial perspective.