Daniel Carranza, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Harvard University, will be the featured speaker at Wartburg College’s annual Kleinfeld Lecture in German History, Culture and Politics at 4:45 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9.

Carranza’s lecture, “Margaret Fuller: A Wild Life in German Letters,” will draw upon his work on Fuller and her connection to German romantic literature. The event, in Wartburg’s Whitehouse Business Center 214, is free and open to the public.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) is sometimes thought of as the first American feminist. Though forbidden from attending Harvard because she was a woman, she was the foremost translator of Goethe and other German authors into American English; Emerson’s secret guide through the world of German literature; and an advocate for the transgressive potential of German culture in democratic America.

The first female war correspondent, she witnessed revolutionary tumult in Italy, married a disgraced Italian nobleman and died in shipwreck with her husband and son on the shores of Boston. This lecture presents an introduction to her life and engagement with German literature as one of the fundamental sources for American transcendentalism.

The annual Kleinfeld Lecture in German History, Culture and Politics is part of an endowed series made possible by a contribution from the German Studies Association.