Martin Baeumel is interested in seventeenth through nineteenth-century literature, aesthetics, and history. He is investigating the evolution of certain social functions that art, especially literature, was intended to fulfill. His main focus is on German-speaking poetry, a genre that not only flourished during the eighteenth century, but also had tremendous influence on notions of subjectivity, experience, and literary form in modernity. He has published articles, among others, on the political, social, and aesthetic concerns of eighteenth century poetry, and is finalizing a book-length study of the emergence of lyric poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Martin studied German and History at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He received his Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Texas in Austin before joining Wesleyan University.