Irina Kogan


After receiving a BA in comparative literature and philosophy from Northwestern University, where she also studied piano performance, Irina spent a year as an English teaching assistant at a high school in Vienna, Austria on a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship. Before joining Yale’s German Department, she spent three years studying at the Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main on a DAAD scholarship. In addition to her academic research, Irina has worked as a German-language instructor for the WORLD Class Program at Yale’s MacMillan Center. In her dissertation, she will investigate a possible relation between Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment and Paul Celan’s re-thinking of Osip Mandelstam’s conception of poetry.

Recent academic work:

Nachtisch/ nach Tische: Narration of Narration in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,” presentation at the Graduate Student Conference Reading Exhaust –, Brown University, German Department, October 2017

“Following the Tracks of a Task: W.G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin on the Function of Literature as Translation,” presentation at the conference Fictions of History, CUNY, The Graduate Center for Humanities, May 2017

“Narrating Ghosts Orphically in Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” presentation at the Graduate Student Conference Becoming Epistolary, NYU, German Department, April 2017

“Forced to Re-read: Reading in Heidegger’s Essay ‘Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung’,” presentation at the Graduate Student Conference The End: Theories and Practices of Narrative Endings, Cornell University, German Department, November 2016

“The Odyssey of a Word: The Transformation of the Relationship between Homecoming and Language through Three Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” presentation at the Graduate Student Conference Heimat: Living, Loving, and Leaving Home, University of Wisconsin-Madison, German Department, October 2016

“At a Loss for Words: Paul Celan’s Translation of a Poem by Osip Mandelstam,” presentation at the conference Translation Theory Today, CUNY, The Graduate Center, May 2016