About Me

I am Associate Professor of German and the Humanities at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. There, I am also a part of the Program in Comparative Literature, and was founding chair of the College's major program in Film and Media Studies.

I work at the intersections of media history and theory, literature, and philosophy, and have published on a range of topics in these fields. I have also worked as an academic translator and have published several translations of contemporary German scholars (Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Waldenfels, Anselm Haverkamp) and media-historical curiosities (Heinrich von Kleist's "Proposal for a Projectile Post"). 

My current book project draws together many of these interests. Tentatively entitled Fabricating the Past: Media and the Make-Up of Time, it uses a number of medially and historically specific forms of fabrication -- fake news, false memories, bureaucratic fraud, fictional documentaries, falsified encyclopedia entries -- as a way of studying the impact of media environments upon our experience of time and history. Synthesizing work in the phenomenology and philosophy of time with recent work in French science and technology studies and German media theory, it aspires to a historically rich and theoretically ambitious rethinking of temporality from the perspective of "memory media." 

In my teaching, I have enjoyed the privilege of institutions and colleagues willing to support wide-ranging, experimental, sometimes quixotic interdisciplinary courses, and students eager to accompany me on these journeys. Classes I have designed and taught at Reed include "Thinking Machines: Androids and Automatons in Science and Fiction"; "The Mass(es') Media: Media Theory and Mass Representation in Weimar"; "Psy-Fi: Psychoanalysis and Fiction"; and "Visions of Modernity: Science, Media, and Magic in Europe, 1770-1910" (with Mary Ashburn Miller). 

I also 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.