Kylee Bolinger graduated from Portland State University in 2021 with a Bachelor's Degree in German and a history minor. Her honors thesis, Methods of Memorialization: Holocaust Commemoration in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, dealt with the various methods used by museums to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust. Her research interests include studying the written words of Holocaust experiencers to better understand the dynamics of loss and absence, and she is passionate about applying the lessons to be learned from history to the modern era. She is also interested in Jewish-German literature and art from the 20th Century.

Henrique Carvalho Pereira received his BA in History from the Universidade de São Paulo in 2017, with minor studies in Romance Philology and Brazilian Literature. He then went on to receive an MA with distinction and praise in Comparative Literature from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 2020, where he wrote a thesis on Paul de Man. After that he lived in Germany for about a year deepening his studies on the German language, and moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he completed another MA, in Modern Germanic Cultures as a fellow of the Max-Kade Institute, in 2023, with a project on Hölderlin. He has also been teaching foreign languages for some years now: English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, and French. He is proud to have served as an external consultant for the board of directors at Vulpes Idiomas, a language institute he helped found and build in his home country.  His academic interests emerge at the crossroads of the languages of literature and philosophy, particularly with regards to figural language and structures of verbal representation. His main readings at Brown are in German Idealism (Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling), French Romanticism (Rousseau, Rimbaud, Baudelaire), English Romanticism (Wordsworth, Blake, Keats), and Portuguese-language Romanticism (Marquesa de Alorna, Júlia Cortines). He understands knowledge to be a collective effort and is therefore excited about helping strengthen environments of collaboration and mutual support, as well as having sincere discussions that are based on respect, curiosity, and aimed at the improvement of each other's work.

Ioannis studied German, Literature, Philosophy and Latin at Bielefeld University, Meiji University in Tokyo and Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen. He received his M.A. in 2023 with a thesis on the subject " Love as Gift, Love as Excess. Constellations of Love in the Work of Theodor W. Adorno". In this thesis, Ioannis investigated the epistemological potential of the erotic and its suspicious similarity to the aesthetic experience of the artwork. His research interests include Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School critical theory, Marcel Proust's Recherche, as well as Pop Literature and Hip-Hop.

At Brown University, he is working on a synthesis of postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.  To this end, he compares the very different readings of literary texts that have resulted from the different traditions of thought. Accordingly, this is to be the basis for a redefinition of epistemology, which turns out to include an erotic-aesthetic approach to reality.

Ioannis Dimopulos is a fellow at the Institute for Critical Theory in Berlin (inkrit). He also writes for the feuilleton of the German daily newspapers Welt and ND, among others.

Justin earned his BA in International Studies from the University of Colorado Denver, where his honors thesis examined the history of the Balkan nations since 1800 and its interplay with the construction of international norms. In 2019, he completed his MA in German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His thesis, titled Heine der Narr: Towards a Universal Freiheitsliebe, examines the intersections of political society with satire and poetry in the literary tradition of the German Vormärz. His academic interests continue to include historical memory, epistemology and the philosophy of language, and critical theory. Justin's family is dedicated to wildlife and natural resource preservation, operating a horse ranch and land conservation project in the Colorado foothills.

Simon is studying the overlapping tasks of literature and other media, continental philosophy, and critical theory in Europe and Latin America. He’s especially interested in kinds of negation, literal metaphors, materialities of thought, theories of history, critical style, and answerability. Kafka, Benjamin, Lispector, César Aira, Derrida, Heidegger, and Calderón are currently on his mind. He is a graduate of Yale and Cambridge.

Serena graduated from Rutgers University in 2022 with B.A.s in German and Cognitive Science. Her honors thesis, “Praying for Language: Hamacher’s Bogengebet and the Possibility of Address” was about the relationship between address and language in Werner Hamacher’s philological works. After completing her undergraduate degrees, she spent a year as a Fulbright Student at the University of Graz studying early quantum physicists’ interests in the poetics of atomic physics. She is currently interested in the philosophy of language, phenomenology, and the history of physics in German speaking Europe.

Ethan studied Critical and Political Theory at Macalester College (B.A. 2018). His research interests include difficulties with ethics and impossibility, read primarily within 19th and 20th century German and French prose and poetry, literary theory, Jewish-German philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Jasmin studied philosophy, German Studies (BA) and the Ethics of Textual Cultures (MA) in an interdisciplinary degree program that brings together philosophy, German literary studies, linguistics, and religious studies. In her MA thesis, she focused on concepts of hope in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. Her main current research focus continues to be the work of Nietzsche and its reception—often the subject of misuse or even abuse—in the present and the past. Her perspective derives from an “ethical” point of view and poses questions such as the following: What does it mean to read in an “ethical” manner, and what does this practice exclude? What does the possibility of “unethical” reading tell us about language itself?

Michael studied Theater, Film and Media Studies, German and Philosophy at the University of Vienna where he received his M.A. with his thesis: Hermeneutics Of Failure – Underway to Bertolt Brecht’s Fatzer-fragment, in which he discussed the possibilities of re-reading, re-discovering and re-interpretation of the works of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in the aftermath of the theoretical conceptions of fragment, detail and discontinuity. His various research interests range from the legacy of the fragmentary demand of the Romantic via the broad operational areas of Critical Theory to current questions in literary theory or continental philosophy.  At Brown University he wants to explore contemporary discourses and narratives of human rights, justice and violence in the fairway of deconstructive theory of literature and language. His questions circle around the non-controllable element within language – a critical residual, remains or remnant (Rest) and what happens when the intervention of the Other is excluded from the calculus or economy of the political.

Mirjam Paninski previously studied Comparative Literature, German Studies, Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of Culture at the University of Vienna. Her multimedia dissertation project "Insistences – Voices in Partum, Bodies in Labor," consisting of a written dissertation and a series of art installations, seeks to counter imaginary concepts and stagings of the body during pregnancy and birth as well as the dehumanization of both the pregnant individual and medical staff. The project follows the argument, that the body during pregnancy and childbirth is itself always a site, which subverts the naturalization of a normative system. More broadly, her teaching and research interests have included translation and translatability of and within 20th-century poetry, the gaps of language, the manifestation of trauma, and the loss of speech within literature and multilingual literature. Prior to her time at Brown, Mirjam was a founding member of the poetry translation collective Versatorium, Vienna. She has significant professional experience curating.

Soenke studied European Literatures (B.A. 2017) and German Literature (M.A. 2020) at the Philipps University of Marburg, with shorter stays at the University of Bonn and Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the interplay of intellectual history and the materiality of print media, both in discourses of theory and popular culture. Particular fields of interest include the chronopoetics of history, early critical theory, and the co-evolution of the popular imaginary and political thought.