Ron Sadan

Ron Sadan teaches German language and culture at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in German from Princeton University in 2025, where he taught language and literature for the Department of German and the Princeton Center for Language Study. His teaching combines communicative practice with guided work on films, recordings, and texts made for German-speaking audiences.

His research focuses on twentieth-century German literature, textual scholarship, translation, and the history of the press. His book, Near Sense: Literary Opacity through the Feuilleton Form, has been solicited for publication in the Brill | Fink series Robert Walser-Studien. The book asks how difficult writing found a place in the commercial German-language press of the interwar years. Tracing Robert Walser’s work from the pencil-written “microscripts” through fair copies to publication, it argues that the feuilleton shaped the process of composition itself. He has begun work on a second project that extends the book’s study of manuscript and print to modernist writing more broadly. The project examines how the material processes of drafting, revision, editing, and publication shaped gendered legibility, bringing book history into conversation with trans studies and gender studies and with the history of sexual science.

With Lukas Gloor, he is preparing an edition of Carl Seelig’s “Homestories,” some sixty illustrated magazine profiles of writers, artists, and performers at home. With Jane O. Newman, he translated and introduced Erich Auerbach’s previously unpublished writings on Giambattista Vico for Comparative Literature (2022). For Gregory Spears’s opera Sleepers Awake, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, he provided English translations of the Robert Walser source texts and served as dramaturg for its 2026 world premiere. He is currently writing a libretto based on the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent.