About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of German and the Humanities at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon.

I work at the intersections of media history, literature, and philosophy, and have published on Kleist, Kafka, secrets, bureaucracy, Shakespeare, the history of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss (and concrete), contemporary German media theory, and Niklas Luhmann. I have also worked as an academic translator and have published work in these and related fields (Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Waldenfels, Anselm Haverkamp).

My dissertation ("Irreversible: Kleist, Kafka, and the Present's Past") offers a window onto the history of time, the emergence of a Copernican Turn in late 18th century regarding the relationship between past and present. Historical ruptures and new media technologies, I argue, produced the insight that the past is a function of the present--and not vice versa.

In my teaching, I have a soft spot for formalist criticism and close reading: the first course that I designed from the ground up was entitled "Erzählanfänge. Problems with Beginning and Beginning with Problems" and taught upper-level undergraduates to analyze literary beginnings, while leading them through a series of canonical examples.

My work and study has been recognized and supported by several institutions, including the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Berlin Program For Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität zu Berlin, the France Chicago Center, the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago.

My academia.edu page is available here.

Contact me at frasermj at reed dot edu.