Alienating Thomas Mann
Monday, Nov. 24, 20255:15 - 7:15 pm ET (US)
Mandel Reading Room 303, Mandel Center for Humanities, Brandeis University Campus
*Refreshments will be provided.*
About the Event
Join CGES for this symposium on Thomas Mann! The following talks will be held:
- Three Key Readings - with Meike Werner
- "The Magic Mountain - an Anthropocene Novel." with Elisabeth Strowick
- “Climbing The Magic Mountain.” with Veronika Fuechtner
About the Speakers
Elisabeth Strowick is Professor of German at New York University. Before joining NYU, she was Professor of German and Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. Elisabeth Strowick has held several academic positions, including visiting professorships, at universities in the United States (Yale, Vanderbilt), Germany (FU Berlin, Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, University of Hamburg), and Switzerland (University of Zurich, University of Basel). She was awarded a Feodor Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her areas of expertise are German literature, culture, and thought from the 19 th century to the present, with a special emphasis on literary theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, poetics of knowledge, and ecocriticism.
Veronika Fuechtner is Chair of Comparative Literature and Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth. She also teaches in Jewish Studies, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In addition, she occasionally has held an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education at the Geisel School of Medicine. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic (University of California Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia (Camden House, 2013) and A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 (University of California Press, 2017). She recently completed a monograph on Thomas and Heinrich Mann's Brazilian mother, Julia Mann, and the Mann family construction of race and "Germanness.” And she is the editor of the forthcoming Norton critical edition of Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Her research interests include the history of psychoanalysis and sexology, the relationship between science and culture, discourses on race and ethnicity, German-language modernism, contemporary culture, German-language film, and global cultural and scientific histories. She has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, The American Academy in Berlin, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Research Council. She is serving on the editorial board of PMLA and she chairs the conduct and anti-harassment committee of the GSA.
Meike G. Werner is Centennial Professor of German and European Studies at Vanderbilt University where she also is director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies. In 1996, she received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in German at Yale University. After teaching at Brandeis University, she joined Vanderbilt University in 1997. Werner has published on German literature, print media, intellectual history, and the history of Germanistik from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her most recent books include Katakombenzeit. Wilhelm Flitner in Hamburg 1929-1969 (2025), Gruppenbild mit Max Weber (2023), Peter Demetz. Was wir wiederlesen wollen (2022) as well as Germany’s Other Modernism. The Jena Paradigm 1900-1914 (2023).
Steve Dowden is a Professor of German at Brandeis and chairs its Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures. He also directs its program in European Cultural Studies. 