Graduate Student Views on German Studies: Where We Are and Where We’re Going

Date: 

Thursday, April 29, 2021, 3:00pm to 5:00pm

Location: 

Virtual. Register to receive link.

This panel discussion features graduate students from Cornell University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of California at Berkeley, and University of Chicago.

The event is part of the German Studies: New Perspectives seminar series at the Mahindra Humanities Center. Pre-registration is required. Follow this link to register. 

Panelists

Juan-Jacques AupiaisJuan-Jacques Aupiais, Cornell University

Juan-Jacques Aupiais (A.B., Princeton University; M.A., Cornell University) is a Ph.D. candidate in German Studies at Cornell University and is spending the current academic year as a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität zu Berlin. His dissertation project uses Édouard Glissant’s concept of creolization as a lens through which to reevaluate the imbrications of race and nation across the century separating German colonial and contemporary literatures, comparing the works of colonial writers like Hans Grimm against contemporary authors like Yoko Tawada and Alexander Kluge. His broader research interests include translation, globalization, critical race theory, post- and de-colonial critique, and the African as well as Asian receptions of German philosophy and literature since the 19th century.

Sophie DuvernoySophie Duvernoy, Yale University

Sophie Duvernoy (A.B., Harvard University; M.A., Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a Ph.D. candidate in German Literature at Yale University, where she focuses on the literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar Republic. She is currently writing a dissertation on the concept of form and its relation to cultural criticism from 1900-1930. Her translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin was published by New York Review Books in 2019, and she is the recipient of the 2015 Gutekunst Prize for young translators. She is now working on a translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers and Emmy Hennings’ Das Brandmal (The Stigma). Her writing and translations have appeared in the Paris Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Man’s Land, and The Offing.

Simon Friedland, University of ChicagoSimon Friedland

Simon Friedland (B.A., Reed College; M.A., University of Chicago) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Germanic Studies Department at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, “The Pulse of Prosody: Versification and Antiquity in the Age of Weimar Classicism,” approaches this historical moment through the fine-grained details of its verse, arguing that prosody is the site where the labor of cultural encounter is carried out and the paradigms of “Ancient” and “Modern” achieve their concrete form. Other interests include German Idealism, fin-de-s​iècle lyric poetry, and theories of exemplarity and imitation. He has articles forthcoming on Goethe and epic verse; the concept of “care” in Heidegger, Kafka, and Blanchot; and loneliness in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

Aleksandra KudryashovaAleksandra Kudryashova, Harvard University

Aleks Kudryashova (B.A.-M.A., Moscow State University; M.A., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her dissertation investigates cinematic reflections on architecture, urban space, and the Wall in 1980s East and West Berlin. Her academic background is in German linguistics and comparative literature; at Harvard, her work has mostly focused on the intersection between literature, architecture, and the visual arts. She is currently co-instructor of a course on American Dreams Made in Hollywood, and her publications include three chapters of the Red Vienna Sourcebook, Das Rote Wien: Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne, 1919-1934.

Michael Sandberg, University of California, BerkeleyMichael Sandberg

Michael Sandberg (B.A., Vassar College; M.A., UC Berkeley) is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of German with a Designated Emphasis in Film and Media Studies. With a focus on early 20th-century German and Scandinavian theater, film, and literature, he is interested in the ways in which early 20th-century neuroscience prompted aesthetic renegotiations of the self and increasingly transnational networks of communicative media. Additional interests include the imagination and contemplative practices, the Frankfurt School, and contemporary German/Scandinavian literature. He has also worked as a freelance translator and is currently the managing Editor of TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World.

William StewartWilliam Stewart, Princeton University

William Stewart (B.A., University of Notre Dame; M.A., Middlebury College/Freie Universität Berlin; M.A., Princeton University) is a dual-degree Ph.D. candidate in Princeton’s Department of German and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. His dissertation tracks the development of a productive synergy between mathematics and humanism in German-speaking contexts after the Second World War. In chapters that examine a diverse and interdisciplinary cast including Max Bense, Oswald Wiener, the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, and Hanne Darboven, it reveals an often unexpected mathematical undergirding to myriad projects devoted to questions of the human in postwar society. His writing has appeared, among other places, in Grey Room, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (ZMK), and the Los Angeles Review of Books.