Contact Information
E-mail:
Office:
Peters 229
(440) 775-8651
Personal Office Hours:
T 10:00a.m - 11:00a.m.
W 2:30 p.m. - 3:30p.m.
And by appointment
Visiting Assistant Professor of German, Sonja Boos
Educational Background
- M.A. Universität Düsseldorf, 1997
- M.A. Princeton University, 2004
- Ph.D. Princeton University, 2008
Sonja Boos joined the faculty at Oberlin College in Spring 2009. Her teaching focuses on 20th and 21st century German literature and culture, and film studies. Courses she has taught include: “Feminist Perspectives on German Cinema,” “Anti-Heimat—Austrian Prose since 1945,” “Urban Trajectories—City and Space in German Modernist Prose ” and “Unspeakable. Representing the Holocaust.” In Spring 2012 she will teach a course on the writings of (and theoretical approaches to the work of) Franz Kafka.
Boos has completed her first book, titled Toward a Rhetoric of Remembrance: Jewish Intellectuals and Postwar Germany’s Public Sphere. The book investigates public speeches (by Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Buber, Paul Celan, Uwe Johnson, Peter Szondi and Peter Weiss) that both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar Germany. The book is currently under review. Boos has published articles on Peter Szondi, Hannah Arendt and Uwe Johnson.
Currently she is working on a new book-length study, tentatively titled Agonistic Hemispheres: The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel. It will be the first systematic and comprehensive study of the disciplinary cross-pollination between the emerging field of neuroscience and the German realist novel in the long nineteenth century. Agonistic Hemisphere builds on Boos’ expertise in nineteenth and twentieth century German literature and culture while combining her longstanding academic interest in psychoanalysis and psychopathology with her new focus on the history of neuroscience. She hopes to demonstrate that the textual and aesthetic experimentations associated with early literary modernism represent symptomatic responses to experimental investigations conducted by contemporary neuroscientists and psychopathologists.
