Sophie Duvernoy

Sophie Duvernoy joined Yale’s German department as a graduate student in 2016. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and an MA in German Literature from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her dissertation project focuses on form in philosophical, art-historical, and sociological writings of the early twentieth century, exploring the status of the term in an emergent discourse of cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic. Authors examined include Moritz Lazarus, Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Georg Lukács and Leó Popper, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, and Gabriele Tergit. Sophie is currently residing in Berlin as a Leo Baeck Fellow for the 2021-22 academic year, and will be participating in the Berlin Program at the Freie Universität Berlin for Spring 2022-23.

In addition to her scholarly work, Sophie is a literary translator. Her translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin was published by NYRB Classics in 2019, and was shortlisted for the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize by the UK Society of Authors in 2022. She is currently working on a translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers (under contract with NYRB Classics). Her essays and translations have appeared in the Paris Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Man’s Land, and The Offing. More information on her writing and translations is available at sophieduvernoy.com.

Publications:

Review of “Branded: A Diary” by Emmy Hennings, translated by Katharina Rout, in: Modern Language Notes, special issue on (In)Visibility, edited by Nicola Behrmann and Antje Pfannkuchen. Forthcoming.

Gertrud Bing: biographical entry, Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive. 06.2021.

“A Tale of Fake News in Weimar Berlin,” in: Paris Review Online. 07.2019.

“Marrow in the Bones: Translating Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in: Los Angeles Review of Books. 03.2018 

Reprinted in Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Ten Year Anthology Issue: Fall 2021.

“Endless Houses or Vast Potatoes? The Impossible Architecture of Frederick Kiesler,” in: Los Angeles Review of Books. 04.2017.