Tanvi Solanki is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. She received her doctorate from the German Department at Princeton University in 2016. From 2016-8 she was the Stanford H. Taylor Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. She has worked as Visiting Fellow at the “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics” research group at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Humboldt University, and the School of Advanced Study at the University of London among others. She will be a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University’s Clare Hall and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences from 2025-2026.

She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature and philosophy, with an approach informed by Sound Studies, media theory, cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, and intellectual and cultural history. A guiding concern of her work is to develop critical methodologies to study the sensory and embodied dimensions of German literature, culture, and media, particularly that of sound.

Her current project is about cultural acoustics and the politics of listening. Its starting point was an exploration of the concept and practice of ‘Listening to Difference,’ which emerged from her dissertation on the German philosopher and polymath J.G.Herder: “Reading As Listening: The Birth of Cultural Acoustics.” Listening to Difference provides a means for critical examination of the German philological tradition’s relationality to difference, both historical and cultural, which was in large part rooted in theories and practices of listening. Several articles emerging from this project have been published in venues including Germanic Review, German Studies Review, Classical Receptions Journal, Historical Reflections, and the Revue germanique internationale.

A second stream of research is about the German reception of Sanskrit canon during the 'Romantic' period and colonial philology. Along with an article on "Colonial Philology and its Erotic Imaginaries: Kalidasa's Sakuntala in Germany" published in a Routledge volume on Gender and German Colonialism, she has an article forthcoming on the European reception of the Ramayana and its multisensorial afterlife in Hindu India in the journal Comparative Literature. It is part of a special issue she is co-editing on Sensing Migrant Romanticism.