Graduate Students
Learn about our current graduate students.
Graduate Students
Learn about our current graduate students.
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Kylee Bolinger
Teaching AssistantKylee 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.
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Henrique Carvalho Pereira
Teaching AssistantHenrique Carvalho Pereira received his BA in History with minors in Brazilian Literature and Romance Philology from the University of São Paulo in 2017. He earned an MA in Comparative Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2020, with an award-winning thesis on Paul de Man, and another MA in Modern German Culture from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2023, with a thesis on Hölderlin. His dissertation at Brown University examines the role of figurative language in both constituting and undermining the objects of ontology and epistemology. He approaches this issue through the lens of what Kant refers to as “the key to the secret of all metaphysics,” namely, “On what ground rests the relationship between that which one calls in us representations (Vorstellungen) and the object of perception (Gegenstand)?” To this end, he analyzes writings from Hegel (to whom half of the dissertation is dedicated), Hölderlin, Rilke, and Proust. In his free time, he enjoys reading (surprising, I know), hiking, spending time with good company, and learning more about South German dialects.
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Ioannis Dimopulos
Teaching AssistantIoannis 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.
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Justin Harris
Teaching AssistantJustin 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.
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Simon Horn
Teaching AssistantSimon studies literature and other media, continental and ancient philosophy, theology, and economic criticism, particularly where they overlap. His dissertation follows uncertain comments in Goethe’s natural-philosophical writings as they unfold in other domains, including the idealisms of Schelling and Caillois, the dream-worlds of Marx and Freud, and the erotics of Hölderlin and Proust. Other persistent interests include kinds of negation, readings of history, critical style, Dante, Cusanus, Lispector, and logics of capital. He is a graduate of Yale and Cambridge.
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Serena Luckhoff
Teaching AssistantSerena 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.
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Ethan Lussky
Department Writing TutorEthan 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.
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Soenke Parpart
Teaching AssistantSoenke 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.
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Melanie Unger
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.
Graduate Students from Other Departments
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.