Roundtable participants dicuss the craft of close reading and its implications for the humanities. The occasion is the German translation of On Close Reading by John Guillory, with an annotated bibliography by Scott Newstock (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the joint Book Series “Historische Geisteswissenschften”, a collaboration between the Frankfurt Humanities Center, the ZfL Berlin, and the KWI Essen.

Scott Newstock is Professor of English and Executive Director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College. He is currently ATRAE Distinguished Researcher at the University of Murcia, Spain. He is the author of How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton University Press, 2020). He also the author of the annotated bibliography for On Close Reading (John Guillory, University of Chicago Press, 2025), which has been named “an extraordinarily comprehensive bibliography compiled by Scott Newstok—a gift to the discipline”—Dan Sinykin, The Nation Newstock’s Close Reading Archive is accessible here: http://closereadingarchive.org/

Eva Geulen is Director of the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL Berlin) and Professor of European Cultural History and the History of Knowledge at Humboldt University Berlin. She is the author of the preface to the German edition of On Close Reading as well as of a forthcoming essay on close reading in Close Reading: Geschichte, Praktiken, Lektionen, eds. Stefanie Heine, Rahel Villinger, Sandro Zanetti (Wallstein Verlag 2026). She has published widely on Goethe’s morphology, German aesthetics, Giorgio Agamben, and German Realism.

Beer Albers is a PhD Candidate in the Excellence Cluster “Cross-Cultural Philology” at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. He is the co-translator, with Sarah Fengler, of On Close Reading.