Sophie Salvo, PhD 2017, currently Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago:
“There are many aspects of my time at Columbia that I am grateful for: the excellent pedagogical training and teaching opportunities, the interesting and provocative seminars, the camaraderie of the students and professors. Above all, I am thankful for how the department trained me as a researcher. In graduate school at Columbia, I learned to approach topics rigorously and historically, to understand the significance of literary forms, and to engage critically with theoretical discourses. My advisors pushed me to develop my own voice—to relate to preexisting scholarship, but not be bound by it—and to think about my contribution to the field.
In addition to the support of my advisors, it was the community of fellow graduate students that made my years at Columbia so memorable. While I don’t miss the eight-floor trek up to the graduate offices at the top of Hamilton Hall, I loved the lively discussions that took place there. Whether you wanted to talk about techniques for teaching the genitive case, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, or the best bar in Morningside Heights, you could always find a passionate interlocutor. Columbia has an intellectual vitality that comes not only from being in New York City, but also from the creative energy of the people it draws.”
Hannes Bajohr, PhD 2017, Currently Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley
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.