01 — About
Core claim · By reconstructing translation concepts tacitly operative in historical translation practices, via both digital and humanistic methods, we can provide concepts critical social theory needs to think forms of collective agency that respond to the world-loss constitutive of modernization experiences and, even more intensely so, of our Anthropocenic condition.
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 literature approaches, and computational text analysis. My current archive is a corpus of over 300 prefaces to translations into German, 1750-1830. Going forward, I will expand this focus, collaboratively, with the guiding hypothesis that moments of incipient modernization are the most fertile grounds for reconstructing sophisticated, practice-immanent translation concepts.
The second is theoretical and 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 main influences here are critical theory, pragmatism, and psychoanalysis.
Fun fact: my Erdős number is four.