Austen Hinkley

Bio

Austen Hinkley works on modern German language literature and thought. He received his BA from Bard College in 2016 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature in 2023.

Austen’s research focuses on aesthetics, media studies, psychoanalysis, and comparative literature. Austen is drawn towards studying texts and cultural materials that are strange, challenging, and bewildering. His dissertation, “Alkahest: Wit’s Formations and Deformations in German Letters” studies the controversial and often nonsensical combinatoric poetics of wit in German-language short forms produced between the Enlightenment and the early 20th century.  He has recently written about dream writing in G.C. Lichtenberg (link) and gambling in Jean Paul (forthcoming). In addition to revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, he is developing a second research project studying how literature depicts, questions, and makes creative use of its own medium: paper.

At Yale, Austen has taught courses on German literature and philosophy, including “Poetics of the Short Form,” “Play: Theories and Practices,” and “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud.” Austen’s course design draws on his background in comparative literature, including texts and materials from a diverse range of times, places, and people. Austen takes a collaborative approach to the classroom, encouraging group work, creative activities and projects, and student-driven discussion and curricula. He particularly enjoys working closely with students on critical writing. Before coming to Yale, Austen taught in the Princeton German Department as a graduate student. There, he taught introductory and intermediate German language classes, as well as an upper-level German language seminar, “Waldeinsamkeit: How to Communicate with Nature,” which studied the long cultural history of the forest in Germany.