About

My research focuses on German literary and intellectual history of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and on intersections of German and Africana intellectual culture.


My current work in progress includes a book manuscript on classical German thought in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk; studies of the reception of Kant in Goethe’s late literary and scientific work; a study of intertextuality and systemic closure in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; a comparative methodological study of the thought of Goethe and of Lévi-Strauss; and a contextualization of the work of Kraftwerk within postwar German politics and aesthetics.


I have been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Foundation, and have taught at Princeton University, UCLA, Brown University, the College of William & Mary, and the College of the Holy Cross.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University

Blog Posts

    Projects

    Manuscript in progress: The Voice of Time: Classical German Thought and the Ethics of Progress in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. (Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities)

    Upcoming Talks and Conferences

    March 2017, at the University of California, Berkeley:

    “From Morphology to Structuralism: Goethe, Lévi-Strauss, and the Sciences of the Concrete”

    Michael Saman

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    @mjsaman

    Active 3 years, 10 months ago