Elizabeth Berman studied German and Art History at Brown, writing an honors thesis on sexual difference and technology in the work of Walter Benjamin under the direction of Prof. Gerhard Richter. She subsequently received an M.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she was also a Fulbright Scholar and lecturer. She is currently an M.A. candidate in German Studies and fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Her research responds to therapeutic discourses in theories of mediation and bioethical debates, engaging the incurably split and sexuated subject of the unconscious, psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of language, and philosophies of cinema and photography to historicize and theorize a conception of life as constitutively divided. In addition to her research, she serves as an assistant editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and has taught on subjects including theories of death and reproduction, Holocaust film and literature, and the history of surveillance.

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.

I have a Bachelor's Degree in History with minor studies in Romance Philology and Brazilian Literature from the University of São Paulo, a Masters in Comparative Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, a Masters in Germanic Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington, and I'm currently working on a PhD at Brown University. I also lived and studied in Heidelberg and Paris (Sorbonne). At Brown, I'm working on a dissertation that seeks to disclose the linguistic underpinnings of consciousness and analyze how they both establish and deconstruct levels of reality and the possibility of cognizing them. For this end, I closely discuss passages from Hegel, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Proust. Parallel interests and projects of mine all orbit English, French, German, and Brazilian literatures and thought from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

Ioannis Dimopulos studied German Studies, Comparative Literature, Latin, and Philosophy at Bielefeld University, Meiji University Tokyo, and the University of Tübingen. In 2023, he received an M.A. with a thesis titled “Love as Gift, Love as Excess: Constellations of Love in the Work of Theodor W. Adorno.” In this thesis, Ioannis examined the epistemological potential of the erotic and its troubling resemblance to the aesthetic experience of the artwork.

His research focus lies at the threshold between literature and philosophy, with an emphasis on modes of thinking and writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. He also works in particular on the philosophy and literary theory of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. At Brown, his work includes research on the problem of suffering and on the attempt to articulate experience in linguistic form.

Ioannis’s research has been published in various journals, including Arcadia. International Journal for Literary Culture, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and Jahrbuch Sexualitäten, as well as in several edited volumes. Ioannis Dimopulos is a fellow at the Institute for Critical Theory in Berlin (inkrit). He also writes for the feuilleton sections of the German daily newspapers Welt, ND, and Freitag.

Simon studies literature and other media, continental and ancient philosophy, theology, natural science, and economic criticism, particularly where they overlap. His dissertation follows comments on metamorphosis from Goethe’s natural-philosophical writings into other domains, including the mythography of Schelling and Caillois, the entomology of Fabre, and works of Hölderlin and Proust in which natural and artificial metamorphoses coincide. Other persistent interests include the novella, the logic of dreams, the nature of judgment, readings of reading, Dante, Calderón, Kafka, Benjamin, Lispector, and Marx. He is a graduate of Yale and Cambridge.

Ava Lasmanis graduated with a B.A. in philosophy, German, and cognitive science in 2024 from Johns Hopkins University. In 2025, she received her M.A. in philosophy, also from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests focus on the intersections of German literature and philosophy at the turn of the 20th century. She is particularly interested in how literature became a modality of existentialism and phenomenology, and how philosophers of this time period embraced literary forms of writing within their more theoretical texts.

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.

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.

Melanie received her BA in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld in 2019, with a minor in general literary studies. Her thesis examined the politicization of aesthetics in online cultures during the Trump election campaign. After completing her Bachelor's degree, she shifted her focus to literary studies at the University of Konstanz, where she explored the European literary canon, representation issues, and language critique. Focusing on literature from the 19th to the 21st century, her research interests included aesthetic theories, language crises, the question of inexpressibility, as well as issues of identity, spatial transitions, and temporal boundaries. She received her MA in 2023 with a thesis on the emerging genre of auto-sociobiography and the issue of representing the non-identical, which language can express. Her research interests include philosophy of language, narratology, early critical theory, interactions between literature and society, auto/biographical narratives, contemporary literature, and the relationship between imagination and experience in current poetological debates. Alongside her studies, she worked as a journalist and news editor and contributed to several volunteer educational projects.