Sebastian Brass

Sebastian Brass teaches German, Swiss, and Austrian literature and thought from the 19^th to the 21^st century. He received his Ph.D. in German literature from Harvard University in 2022, and he holds an M.A. as well as an M.Ed. in English and American literature from Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His dissertation, “Fact, Fiction, and Transparency: Modes of Autobiographical Self-Reference in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries,” shows how modern autobiography entertains a relation with the factual in that it systematically operates with self-referential discourse regarding its own truth claims – even and especially by means of an epistemological skepticism. Other fields of interest include the media theory and aesthetics of reading scenes, the epistemology of case narratives, literary theory, and narratology. Sebastian Brass has published articles on E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gertrude Stein, Christa Wolf, and Marcel Beyer, and he has taught courses on autobiography and romanticism as well as language classes and tutorials in comparative literature.