Johannes Türk joined the German Department of Indiana University Bloomington in 2006. He studied at Freie Universität Berlin, Paris 8 (Paris-Vincennes), and Yale University. In his work, he embeds German topics into a comparative perspective rooted in the classical traditions of rhetoric, aesthetics and poetics as well as in the tradition of continental philosophy. He also works on topics related to the history of knowledge. His book on immunity and literature is concerned with the formation of immunological knowledge from Roman law to the biomedical sciences and its literary reflection. Although he incorporates other literary genres, his major interest lies in the history of the German and the European novel. His current projects comprise emotional memory, ethics and politics of empathy, figures of the political body and the rhetorical trope topography.