This public lecture explores two early 19th‑century women‑led intellectual networks: the Franco‑Swiss Coppet Group of Madame de Staël and the German‑Jewish Romantic Salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz and Dorothea Mendelssohn‑Schlegel. Shaped by experiences of exile and marginalization, these salonnières developed influential critiques of Enlightenment ideals – critiques that challenge the cult of genius and anticipate questions later taken up by the Frankfurt School.

Bridging comparative literature, social and intellectual history, gender studies, philology and philosophy, the talk traces how these salons forged new models of collaborative thought. It invites us to consider how today’s global networks of ideas might cultivate equally inclusive, transformative forms of dialogue across languages and disciplines.

Southern Jewish teatime to follow.

Our inaugural scholar is Eran Horowitz, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Germanic Studies at Yale University. Horowitz earned a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Computer Science and completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. His research, previously supported by a Chateaubriand Fellowship at the Sorbonne and a Minerva Stiftung Fellowship at the Freie Universität in Berlin, bridges philosophy, psychoanalysis and machine learning. Fluent in English, French, German and Hebrew, Horowitz is both a scholar and practitioner of languages and literatures, having published four major works as a multilingual translator and two original novels.