Stephen Dowden

Steve Dowden is a Professor of German language and literature in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures. He graduated in 1984 from the University of California with a Ph.D in German literarture. After a decade teaching at Yale and a year as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Konstanz he joined the Brandeis faculty in 1994. Dowden has published on German literature, art, music, and intellectual history from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. His teaching spans the literature of the Goethezeit to twentieth-century modernism and contemporary (especially Austrian) literature. In addition, he coordinates the unique Brandeis undergraduate major in European Cultural Studies. Dowden’s books include Modernism and Mimesis (2020); Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives (co-edited with G. Thuswaldner and O. Berwald (2020); Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought (co-edited with Thomas Quinn, 2014), Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination (1995); Understanding Thomas Bernhard (1989); Sympathy for the Abyss: A Study in the Novel of German Modernism (1986); German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium (co-edited with Meike Werner, 2002); A Companion to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” (1998); Hermann Broch: Literature, Philosophy, Politics: The Yale Broch Symposium (1988). Currently, he is working on a book entitled Critique of Erotic Reason.