Erik Schilling teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Munich, Germany. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard and Oxford and, in 2020, he was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz prize of the German Research Foundation. He is the author of Authenticity: The Career of a Longing (2020) and The Historical Novel since Postmodernism: Umberto Eco and German Literature (2012).