Alwin Jorga Franke

Alwin Jorga Franke

Before joining Columbia as a doctoral student in the Department of Germanic languages, Alwin Franke studied Comparative Literature, History, and Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts with a thesis on the concept of fetishism in Kant's Critique of Judgment and his anthropological writings. He received his Master of Arts from Columbia University and is affiliated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Alwin is particularly interested in the intersection of literature, anthropology, critical theory, media archeology and the history of science. His further interests include the expression of emotions and the construction of political subjectivity across different genres and media, such as literature, theater, film, and television.

Alwin is currently exploring the narration of subjectivity in literary modernism against the background of two different, but related contexts. The first concerns the interaction between new ways of narrating subjectivity and the emerging concept of milieu in the life sciences; the second engages with the entangled histories of literature, logic, and mysticism in the first decades of the 20th century.

In addition to his academic work, Alwin has worked as guest-editor and translator, and as assistant to filmmaker Hito Steyerl.