Thomas Schestag, Professor of German Studies
The philological and literary communities in Europe and the US are deeply saddened by the loss. Schestag, educated in the fields of Comparative Literature and philosophy in Berlin, Zurich, Strasbourg and Paris, was a singular presence in the Department of German Studies at Brown, which he joined in 2014. He worked intensively with both graduate and undergraduate students, who joined him in his relentless attention to linguistic and textual details and specificities with philosophical, ethical and political ramifications. A prolific scholar and translator and a devoted violinist, Thomas worked across national borders and introduced many writers – both scholars and poets -- from the German- and French- speaking worlds to the Brown community.
Thomas Schestag was born in Freiburg am Breisgau, Germany. Recognized early on by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Schestag began his teaching career at the Lajos-Kossuth-University, Debrečen, Hungary, where he lived for five years before moving to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main; there he completed his Habilitation in 2003. He was invited to teach at a wide range of German and US universities, including Munich, Bonn and Bochum and, in the US, the Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern, NYU, and the University of Virginia, all of which have outstanding German Studies departments. His international reach extended to Japan, Romania and France. He was awarded the Berlin Prize and was the John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities at The American Academy in Berlin in 2013, and was honored many times with grants from the DAAD and Brown to support his research and translation projects. His writing addresses a broad range of philological issues, often thematizing insects, animals and the environment in a network remarkably prescient of future developments in ecocriticism. Thomas Schestag is the author of 11 monographs, including most recently philia (2024), entlaubt, erlaubt (2021), and Namenlose (2020), as well as countless book chapters and journal articles. Among his many editions and translations, his edition of Francis Ponge, Die Sonne [Le Soleil] (a facsimile-edition of an unpublished dossier by Francis Ponge, including transcriptions, translations, a philological commentary and a German translation of Francis Ponge, Le Soleil placé en abîme), a tome of over 800 pages, stands out as a massive contribution to European letters. Another major project, a translation of Hugh Raffles’ The Book of Unconformities, has just appeared in August 2026 with the German publisher Matthes & Seitz. Schestag also translated our local Rhode Island poet, Rosmarie Waldrop (who also hails from Germany) from English to German, creating multiple linguistic passageways back and forth in their Hölderlin Hybrids/Hölderlin Hybride.
Thomas Schestag worked ceaselessly to open language and letters to students, colleagues and readers of all stripes. He was a unique thinker whose work is deeply engaged with language, consistently concerned with the way words and names “rip apart semantic coherence.” Schestag investigates word resemblances and word parts to show how texts function beyond the semantic to offer up at times conflicting, and in any case non-totalizing, interpretations. This deeply philological practice, working with dictionaries and etymologies, is both analytic and generative; and indeed, sometimes Schestag’s work resembles more literature than criticism. His work on insects (for example, the figure of the praying mantis in Mantisrelikte and other works) and flowers (Ponge) intersects with the field of environmental humanities in an unexpected way. Reading Schestag is its own experience to which paraphrase and description cannot do justice.
Thomas Schestag was a warm and devoted teacher, mentor, colleague and friend. He will be sorely missed by the many whose lives were touched, and left the better for it, by his wisdom, generosity, and good cheer. He is survived by his wife, Catherine Witt, and their daughter Talulah, his children David and Laila and their mother Eva Schestag, as well as his sister Inge Schestag.
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His publisher Engeler Verlag has also shared a Gedenkseite by which we can remember Thomas.
The Department sends our deepest sympathies to Thomas' family and to all who knew and were impacted by his presence.