Stefan Lessmann

Stefan Lessmann is a lector at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He previously finished his Ph.D. at Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature with a dissertation on sexuality and the form of the novel in twentieth-century German and Hispanophone literature (2025). Before coming to the US, he received his BA and MA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Vienna, Austria.

In the summer of 2024, Stefan Lessmann was an academic guest with the German academic exchange service (DAAD) at the research group “Philology of the Adventure” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. In 2023, he received the University of Southern California’s ‘German Exile Studies Research Grant’ for research at the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library.

Teaching and research interests:

Fiction and theories of the novel; the history of sexuality; literature and AI; Austrian and German literature and intellectual history in North and South America; memory culture in the German language classroom; intercultural competence.