Christine A. Knoop

Dr. Christine A. Knoop is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. With a focus on empirical approaches to literary and linguistic phenomena, her work bridges cognitive science, neuroscience, and aesthetics.

• PhD in Literary Studies (University College London, 2009)
• Magister Artium in German and French Literature/Theatre Studies (LMU Munich, 2004)
• Mobility grant from the Bavarian-French University Center (2001–2002)

Her research explores the cognitive and affective implications of elegance, prose rhythm, and the neural substrates of parallelistic diction (e.g., alliteration, meter, anaphora). She investigates how linguistic features like rhyme, metaphor, and musicality in language influence aesthetic experiences.

Recent publications analyze prosodic phrasing in spoken prose, melodic properties in poems/songs, and neural responses to grammaticality in literary contexts. Her empirical methods span EEG experiments, behavioral studies, and computational modeling.

• Heisenberg Fellow (2020–present)
• Postdoctoral grant from the 'Languages of Emotion' cluster (2012–2013)
• Graduate School Scholarship (UCL, 2004–2007)

Knoop co-edited Cumaná 1799 (2013) and authored monographs on Kafka (2018) and Kundera (2011). She contributes to understanding metaphor processing, rhyme perception, and the phenomenology of aesthetic experience.