Jan Kuehnel - Graduate Exchange Student
German Studies
Jan studied Modern German Literature, Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the Eberhard-Karls Universitaet, Tuebingen, where he also worked as a Research- and Teaching Assistant at the chair for International Literatures and Modern German Literature. 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”.
Before coming to Brown he had been also working as an editor for a series of anthologies as well as participating in the organization of the conferences for the international and interdisciplinary research project WerteWelten, supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts, Baden-Wuerttemberg.
His research interests include the relation of truth, fiction and literature, as well as the interplay of “fictionality” and “fictivity” in narrative writing including authors like Walter Benjamin, Hubert Fichte as well as contemporary writers like Christoph Ransmayr and Christian Kracht. He is also interested in the philosophy of Enlightenment, the aesthetics of postmodern literature, the poetology/poetics of emotions and affects, and “non-hermeneutic” approaches to intercultural studies.
He has participated in several interdisciplinary research projects such as “Perception of / and in literature” (along with the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics / Centre of Integrative Neuroscience, Tuebingen) and “Play and Game as Motif and Structure” (“Das Spiel als Motiv und Struktur” – along with the Department for Affective Neuropsychiatry / Forum Scientiarum).
In Tuebingen, he has also been longtime Editor-in-Chief for the university magazine “Kupferblau” and participated in the organization of the “Ract!-Festival” (a supra‐regional annual festival event mainly for the encouragement of youths to political participation and social commitment)
