Aida Feng

Aida joined the Yale German Department as a graduate student in 2019 after receiving degrees in German Studies and Biology at Brown University. Her undergraduate work in the former culminated in a term paper that compared Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster and Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, with particular attention to their respective understandings of the term “responsibility.” While studying German, she also conducted research in Environmental Science analyzing whether soil nitrogen availability could provide a reliable proxy for predicting the regrowth of tropical forests in Brazil. After graduation, she taught high school English in Mönchengladbach, Germany with a Fulbright grant and worked at the University of Connecticut as a chemistry laboratory technician.

In her graduate work, Aida continues to be drawn to literary and theoretical texts that thematize the linguistic intersection of the personal and the sociopolitical. Examples include: the condition of alienation from language and society that emerges from geopolitical displacement; the role of language and culture as a political tool; theories of truth, representation, and reproduction in literature, philosophy, and science. Other areas of interest include critical theory, linguistics, philosophy of science, and environmental humanities.