The Graduate Students in the department work on specific projects within the area of German Studies, but also have secondary fields of interest in which they do coursework, conduct research, and teach.

Click on the names of the students to see more complete profiles.

BENJAMIN BRAND studied German, English, Politics and Journalism at the Saint Mary’s University Halifax (CA) and the University of Dortmund, where he received his M.A. in Applied Literary and Cultural Studies. Benjamin is interested in “writing” understood as the now of literary production and the material as well as the immaterial resistances that have to be overcome in the emergence of a (literary) text.

ERIC FOSTER received a B.A. in Germanics from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2005, a B.A. in Linguistics from Western Washington University in 2007 and an M.A. in German Studies from the University of New Mexico in 2009. Eric’s academic interests include 18th century German aesthetics (including Winckelmann, Baumgarten, Meier, Lessing, and Herder), religious studies, hermeneutics, anthropology, and the philosophy of language (specifically works by Herder, Hamann, and Wilhelm von Humboldt).

STEPHANIE GALASSO graduated from the University of California at Davis in June 2012 with degrees in German and English Literature. During her time at Brown, she hopes to explore and hone her interests in critical theory, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis-- particularly as they pertain to memory and trauma in the Romantic and post-Romantic German canon.

DENNIS JOHANNSSEN received his M.A. in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany with a thesis on Walter Benjamin’s anthropological materialism. His research interests include German Idealism, Western Marxism, philosophical anthropology, and the political imaginary in the literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

JAN KUEHNEL studied Modern German Literature, Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the Eberhard-Karls Universitaet, Tuebingen. As an exchange student he is currently working as a Teaching Assistant at Brown while finishing his MA Thesis on “Truth in/through literature. Political realism(s) in Schiller’s plays”.

SILJA MAEHL is a PhD candidate and currently working on her dissertation, in which she examines new aesthetic perspectives in contemporary German literature. She is interested in works by writers whose mother tongue is not German or who write in more than one language in parallel.

MICHAEL POWERS is a Ph.D. candidate and currently working on his dissertation project, which investigates moments and practices of visual dis-figuration in the writings of Walter Benjamin. His interest in the relation between Benjamin’s visual aesthetics and that of writers such as Kant, Kleist, Marx and Kafka, derives from a larger interest in the history of aesthetics in modernity.

SETH THORN studied philosophy, critical theory and viola performance at Northwestern and completed an M.A. in political theory at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. In addition to his doctoral pursuits in German, with special emphasis on the study of German philosophy and the philosophy of music and sound where it appears in that tradition, Seth is working towards an M.A. in Brown's Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments (aka "MEME") program.

Graduate Students from Other Departments

In addition, there are many other graduate students at Brown working towards Ph.D.s in other field but who are active in our department through their participation in seminars, workshops, and colloquia.

NATALIE ADLER (Comparative Literature)
Natalie received her B.A. from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. Before coming to Brown, she was an English teacher at a primary school in Besançon, France. She studies modernism and psychoanalysis.

FILIP ANI (Comparative Literature)
BA in History and Spanish Language and Literature; MA in History (U. Alberta). Filip works on a diverse range of topics ranging from W. Benjamin's aesthetics of history to W. Shakespeare’s relationship to philosophy. He also has particular interests in P. Celan, P.B. Shelly, H. Heine. H. von Kleist, H. Melville, Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Horace. In addition, Filip has worked on the Brown University Petra Archeological Project (BUPAP) in Jordan.

PETER KIM (English)
Peter holds a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley. He is interested in the relations between literature and philosophy with regards to critical theory and 19th-Century British literature. Specific interests include Frankfurt School aesthetics, the Victorian political novel, and theories of English and German Romanticism.

NATALIE LOZINSKY-VEACH (Comparative Literature)
Natalie holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Spanish and a B.A. in German, both from SUNY New Paltz. She is interested in animality, posthumanism, feminism, theories of embodiment, reciprocity and liminality and their relationship to textual bodies and language. She works on 20th and 20st century literature, with a focus on German and Polish socialist and post-socialist works.

ADAM J SACKS (History)
Adam holds an M.A. from Brown University, a Masters of Science from the City College of the City University of New York, and a B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Cornell University. In 2011, he was the Cahnmann Foundation Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and was awarded the dissertation Grant of the Central European History Society. He is serving as a fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes in 2012 while also a Guest Researcher at the new Reseach Center for Exile Culture at the Universitaet der Kuenste in Berlin.

IAN SAMPSON (English)
Ian is a doctoral student in the English department, studying Romantic poetry and posthumanist theory. He holds degrees in English and creative writing from the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University, where he wrote an MA thesis about the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa and his influence on Ezra Pound. Since coming to Brown in 2011, he has also become a clandestine Germanist, reading Hölderlin and Heidegger alongside Wordsworth and Whitehead – a side-effect, no doubt, of regularly summering with family in Köln. Beyond Romanticism, his interests include media theory, psychoanalysis, and the avant-garde.

JONATHAN SOZEK (Religion and Critical Thought)
Jon received a B.A. in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003 and an M.A. (honours) in religious studies at McGill University in 2006. After working for several years in secondary education, Jon moved to Belgium to complete a second B.A. (2009) and M.A. (2010) in philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His ongoing reserarch interests include the conceptual histories of 'religion' and 'the secular' and of their relation, modern theories of myth and the politics of mythmaking, political theology, and critical theory.