Nathan Taylor has served as Research Director of the Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften / Frankfurt Humanities Center since 2023. His research focuses on German-language and transnational literature since the late 18th century, asking how aesthetic forms relate to shifting social configurations. His work draws on a broad corpus of critical theory to examine problems of literary and economic value, histories of fugitivity, displacement, and exile in relation to global logistics chains, and contemporary poetics.

Nathan Taylor joined the German Department of the Goethe-University in 2017, where he coordinated the interdisciplinary Masters program in Aesthetics. After studying German and Economics at Austin College and the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Nathan Taylor completed his PhD in German Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 2017. His research has been financed by an International Mellon Fellowship of the Science Research Council, a research fellowship from the DAAD, and a Fulbright Grant to Germany. He has served on the editorial board of diacritics.

Nathan Taylor's first book Invaluable: German Prose and the Rise of the Value Form examines the problem of value as a central and polyvalent concern of German literature and thought in the long nineteenth century. It reads a paradigmatic selection of texts between German Romanticism and Modernism to ask how literature responds to its own devaluation when social life comes to be rearranged around the production of value in the exclusive sense of economic value. A second monograph, Fugitive Logistics: Unsettling the German Archive, shifts from discourses of value to global value chains. This book draws on an emerging field of ‘infrastructural’ and critical logistics studies to rethink paradigms of exile and Atlantic migration in German Studies. Nathan Taylor is currently editing a forthcoming Glossar der Gegenwartsästhetik with Moritz Baßler and Heinz Drügh. With Maud Meyzaud he has edited a special issue of Sprache und Literatur on ‘Flucht und Verflechtung’, and with Nicolas von Passavant a first collection of essays on the contemporay poet Monika Rinck titled Monika Rinck: Poesie und Gegenwart.