Research interests:
Theories of the digital, digital literature and generative AI, German 20th century history of philosophy, political theory.
Role:
Assistant Professor, Department of German
After studying philosophy, German literature, and modern history at Humboldt University, Berlin, and New York University, Hannes Bajohr received his Ph.D. from Columbia University with a dissertation on Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language. Prior to joining Berkeley’s Department of German in 2024, he held postdoctoral positions at Berlin’s Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Zurich’s institute of advanced studies, the Collegium Helveticum.
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. A particular interest connects him to figures like Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, and the political theorist Judith N. Shklar, six of whose books he has edited and translated into German.
His work has been supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation as well as the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2022, he was invited to give the Walter Höllerer Lecture at the Technische Universität, Berlin, and the Poetics Lecture at the University of Hildesheim. In 2024, he received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature by the Electronic Literature Organization.
Professor Bajohr is not only a theoretician but also a practitioner of digital literature. He has published numerous generative works as a part of writers’ collective 0x0a, including the volume Halbzeug (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), which was translated into English as Blanks (Denver: Counterpath, 2021). In 2023, he published (Berlin, Miami), a novel co-written with a self-trained large language model.
Currently, he is working on a project about “post-artificial writing,” the impact of generative AI on literary reading expectations; and on another on “negative anthropology,” a strand of German philosophy that eschews any definition of an “essence of man” but still insists on making the human the main focus of its attention.
