The Department of German is pleased to welcome Dr. Hannes Bajohr. He has published extensively on the impact of digital writing technologies on language and literature, the German philosophical tradition in the 20th century – especially the connection between phenomenology and anthropology – as well as liberal and republican political theory. Professor Bajohr is not only a theoretician but also a practitioner of digital literature.
Bajohr’s recent work has focused on the digital conditions of language and literary practices, with an emphasis on natural language generation in the context of stochastic machine learning. He has incorporated this research into his poetry, for which he uses traditional algorithms and machine learning. He has several publications in academic journals like German Studies Review and Poetics Today, the latter of which published his co-written essay, “On Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts: Machine Learning and the Reading Expectations of Literary and Non-Literary Writing,” which received the Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Association in July 2024. Originally from Berlin, he studied philosophy, German literature, and history at Humboldt University of Berlin before completing his doctorate in 2017 at Columbia University, where he wrote his dissertation on history and metaphor using philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language. After earning his Ph.D., he returned to Berlin, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research. Bajohr also served as a postdoctoral fellow in literary media studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland from 2022-23 before becoming a postdoctoral researcher the following year.