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Alexander Sorenson

Assistant Professor of German

German and Russian Studies

Biography

Alexander Sorenson is an assistant professor of German Studies and the founding organizer of the Environmental Humanities Working Group at 91社区. His research and teaching interests center on interdisciplinary themes related to conceptions of nature in the German literary, intellectual, and aesthetic tradition from the late 18th to the early 20th century.

 His first book,  (Cornell University Press, 2024), examines the relationship between water imagery, law, and sacrifice in Poetic Realism. He is currently at work on a second project titled Late Roses: Sacramentality, Apocalypse and the Ecology of Transience, which explores the poetic, philosophical, and theological antecedents of modern environmental consciousness. Publications of his have appeared in The German QuarterlyLiterature & TheologyThe Germanic Review, Forum for Modern Language Studies, German Life & Letters and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has also been a guest on the  and  podcasts.

Education

  • PhD, University of Chicago 
  • MA, University of Chicago
  • BA (summa cum laude), Portland State University

Research Interests

  • German literature, culture and thought ca. 1780-1917
  • Modern European intellectual history
  • Philosophical, theological and cultural accounts of nature
  • Convergences between the natural and human sciences

Teaching Interests

  • German language and literature
  • European and comparative literature, culture, thought (Enlightenment鈥擡xpressionism)
  • Environmental Humanities

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Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae for Alexander Sorenson