Core Faculty and Staff -- Visiting Faculty -- Postdoctoral Fellows -- Resource Faculty -- Emeriti Faculty

Postdoctoral Fellows

Jan Lazardzig, Ph.D., Feodor Lynen Scholar - Curriculum vitae.pdf

Jan Lazardzig is a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow in the Department for Germanic Studies (Spring 2011-Spring 2013). He worked as a Lecturer for Theater Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and was a member of the Collaborative Research Center Kulturen des Performativen (2001-2010). Jan was a Visiting Scholar for Theater History at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Hildesheim. In winter 2010/11 he served as a Visiting Professor for Aesthetics and Theater Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Münster. Jan is currently a co-convenor for the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) with Yael Zarhy-Levo and David Wiles. Additionally, Jan is co-editing the book series Theatrum Scientiarum (Walter de Gruyter), a study on the intersection between the history of science and the history of theater in the 17th and early 20th century, alongside Helmar Schramm and Ludger Schwarte. Jan’s dissertation was published under the title Theatermaschine und Festungsbau. Paradoxien der Wissensproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007). His Introduction to Theatre Historiography (G. Narr, UTB), co-authored with Matthias Warstat and Viktoria Tkaczyk is forthcoming. Jan’s current research project questions the manifold relationships between theater and the police in nineteenth-century Germany.

Olga Solovieva, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow - Curriculum vitae.pdf

Olga Solovieva joined the department as a Postdoctoral Scholar in July 2011 after stints teaching Film at Smith College, Yale and Georgia Institute of Technology and conducting research at the Museum of Prints and Drawings in Berlin. She received her M.A. (German and Russian Literatures) from the Freie Universität Berlin and her Ph.D. (Comparative Literature and Film Studies) from Yale. Her dissertation examined the religious notion of the body of Christ and the epistemological basis it has offered for alternative or subversive social and medial constructs at some critical junctures in the history of Western civilization. Her postdoctoral research project is a book, Thomas Mann’s Russia, that will reconstruct Mann’s attempted mediation among the conflicting intellectual paradigms of his time, a mediation that relies on an alternative way of thinking and a different cultural sensibility, which for Mann meant, in particular, a Russian model. Olga Solovieva’s work brings into dialogue texts and concepts from numerous domains, including literature, film, religious studies, art history, philosophy and law. She is interested in what can "be done with words": this leads her to focus on the history of rhetoric, performance, communication, interdisciplinary narratology, and media studies, particularly in their material and corporeal aspects. She contributes to www.printculture.com, a collective blogzine on culture, politics, and academic life.

Arata Takeda, Ph.D., Feodor Lynen Scholar- Curriculum vitae.pdf

Arata Takeda joined the department as a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, for a two-year appointment beginning in February 2012. Takeda is preparing an extensive work on the social and cultural history of terror, understanding thereby a principle which is at work in a number of areas of human life. The particular focus of his project lies upon the historical transformation of terror from an aesthetic method to a political strategy. By examining the implications of this momentous shift for literature, philosophy, and cultural theory, Takeda seeks to answer the question where modern terrorism draws its repulsive and at the same time contagious effect from. In additional support for his research, he was awarded the 2012 William M. Calder III Fellowship by the American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Takeda obtained his Ph.D. in modern German literature and comparative literature from the University of Tübingen. His dissertation entitled Ästhetik der Selbstzerstörung: Selbstmordattentäter in der abendländischen Literatur, which challenges the popular view of suicide terrorism as a non-Western phenomenon by discussing salient examples from Western history and literature, was published in 2010 and caught the attention of German media. Takeda has been Lecturer in modern German literature and comparative literature at the University of Tübingen (2008–2011) and Research Fellow at International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (Oct 2011–Jan 2012). He has taught seminars on Human Dignity in cooperation with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty (with Alberto Jori) and is working with several state education authorities in Baden-Württemberg for improving the quality of intercultural education (with Elisabeth Rangosch-Schneck). Takeda’s further research interests include 18th-century epistolary novel, theory and history of drama, mimetic theory of René Girard, and theory and practice of transcultural education.

Thomas Wild, Ph.D., Feodor Lynen Scholar - Curriculum vitae.pdf

Thomas Wild joins the department as a Feodor Lynen Visiting Scholar for the academic year 2011-12. He spent the first half of his two-year postdoctoral research fellowship, funded by the Alexander v. Humboldt Foundation, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.  Professor Wild’s research and publications center on the intersection of literature, political philosophy and poetics. His book Nach dem Geschichtsbruch. Deutsche Schriftsteller um Hannah Arendt (Matthes & Seitz Berlin 2009) analyzes the constellation of major post-war German writers around Hannah Arendt and the role of poetry in Arendt’s political thought. In 2006, he authored an introductory book on Hannah Arendt’s life, work, and reception (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 2006).  He co-edited Hannah Arendt’s correspondence with Uwe Johnson (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2004), with Hilde Domin (Sinn und Form, 2010), and with Joachim Fest (Piper, München 2011), as well as a special issue of TEXT+KRITIK on contemporary approaches to Arendt’s thought (München 2005). Since 2001, he has served as a literary critic for several major German newspapers, including Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Tagesspiegel. He has taught and widely published on contemporary German literature and film after 1989, with a special focus on the eminent writer and filmmaker Thomas Brasch, whose poems Was ich mir wünsche (Bibliothek Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 2007) he edited; a special issue of TEXT+KRITIK on Brasch that he co-edited is forthcoming in 2012. Professor Wild has taught at the Universities of Berlin, Göttingen, Munich and Tübingen, at the Berlin Center of IES Abroad and at NYU’s Berlin Program. In the U.S., he has taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College and at Vanderbilt University.  His current book project focuses on the German term “Haltung” (bearing) as a starting point of reflecting upon the interrelations between theoretical (mind/body), political, ethical, and representational problems in writing. Based on readings of literary and philosophical texts from the 18th to the 21st century, the project investigates the relationships between aesthetic and political judgment.