01 — About
Core claim · My work theorizes translational action as response to world-loss. Anthropocenic modernity confronts us with unprecedented loss of our very grounds of being. Can we mourn these, creatively and collectively? Translational action, I wager, names the form of such mourning. I ground this concept in translation concepts reconstructed from actual historical translation practice, via hermeneutic, sociological, and digital methods.
Bio · Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Program at Yale and Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center ('26-7). I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought & Department of Germanic Studies. Prior to that, I studied philosophy, literature, and intellectual history in Paris, Berlin, and my hometown Vienna.
My research moves along two connected lines.
The first is historical and philological. I reconstruct historical concepts of translation by reading corpora of translator's prefaces at multiple distances: close reading through text-immanent (rhetorical, formal) and contextual hermeneutics, genre-move-based sociology of literatyre approaches, and computational text analysis. My current archive is a corpus of over 300 prefaces to translations into German, 1750-1830. Going forward, I seek to expand this focus collaboratively, hypothesizing moments of incipient modernization to as the most fertile grounds for reconstructing sophisticated, practice-immanent translation concepts.
The second is constructive. I am developing a theory of translational action as a form of historical agency, or: agency in response to historical crises. Anthropocenic modernity confronts us with unprecedented world-loss. Translational action restates the old concepts of translatio for our age, as a form of mourning world, practices, concepts structurally. Working through historical damage to the grounds of subject-formation, I contend, is a form of emancipatory agency, building towards free relations both from and with the past.
My Erdős number is four.