Sven-Erik Rose

Professor Sven-Erik Rose in front of a tree

Professor of German and Comparative Literature

407 Sproul Hall

Education and Degree(s)

  • Ph.D., Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania
  • M.A., Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania
  • B.A., German Literature, Reed College

Research Interest(s)

  • German literature 1750-present
  • Jewish literature and thought in Germany and Europe
  • Yiddish literature and culture
  • Holocaust studies
  • Literary theory, trauma theory, and theories of memory
  • The German critical tradition, especially Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud

Course(s) Taught

  • German 116: Readings in Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture
  • German 127: Major Writers in German - Franz Kafka
  • German 141: The Holocaust and its Literary Representation
  • German / Humanities 144: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
  • Humanities 002A (Global Humanities Forum): Revolution!
  • German 259: Studies in Kafka
  • German 297: Literature of the Holocaust
  • German 297: Reading Freud
  • German 297: The Early Marx in Context
  • German 297: The German-Jewish Cultural Tradition

Profile

My teaching and research focus primarily on literature and intellectual history by European Jewish authors writing in German, French, and Yiddish. However, my published articles and book chapters also include work on writing and sexuality in Goethe, eighteenth-century Swedish travel narrative and imperial ideology, and French cinema.

I have published widely in the field of Holocaust Studies, including articles on French-language Holocaust novels by Piotr Rawicz and Patrick Modiano; writings from Nazi ghettos grappling with the experience of hunger; and the Cold War reception of the clandestine Warsaw Ghetto archive “Oyneg Shabes.” With David Bathrick, I co-edited an issue of New German Critique exploring “Ambivalent Sites of Memory in Postwar Germany,” and with Jennifer Geddes I am the co-editor of Lessons and Legacies XVII: Languages of the Holocaust, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. My work has appeared in such venues as the Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature, Comparative Literature, Eighteenth Century Studies, French Studies, Goethe Yearbook, In geveb: a Journal of Yiddish Studies, Jewish Social Studies, New German Critique, Nexus: Essays in German-Jewish Studies, Postmodern Culture, and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.

My first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014) was awarded the Association of Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Philosophy and Jewish Thought; a Russian translation is currently being prepared with Academic Studies Press.

My 2025 book Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) is the first monograph devoted entirely to literary writing by inmates of these Nazi ghettos.

Honors and Awards

  • University of California, Davis Chancellor's Fellow, 2017-2022
  • DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar, “Germans, Jews, and the Collapse of the Secular Future,” Cornell University, led by Jonathan Boyarin, June 20-July 21, 2016
  • Association of Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for best book published in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought during the three-year period 2013-2015, for Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014). Awarded December 2015
  • Residential Fellowship, Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur, University of Leipzig, August 1-31, 2014
  • Faculty Diversity Award (nominee) in recognition of a faculty member whose teaching and/or service promotes knowledge and inclusion of diverse communities, Miami University, 2011
  • Residential Fellowship, Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur, University of Leipzig, May-June, 2011
  • DAAD Junior Faculty Summer Seminar, “The Technology of Memory: Collective Traumatic Remembrance in Modern Germany,” Cornell University, led by David Bathrick, June 16-July 27, 2008
  • Hess Faculty Seminar, “Literature and the Holocaust” at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, co-led by Sara Horowitz and David Roskies, January 3–9, 2007
  • DAAD Junior Faculty Summer Seminar, "Visualizations of the Holocaust: Potentialities and Taboos," Cornell University, led by David Bathrick, June 15-July 25, 2003
  • Posen Foundation Grant for the Study of Secular Judaism Grant of $50,000 per year for curriculum development in secular Jewish studies at Miami University (Ohio), 2006-2007 and 2007-2008; renewed in the amount of $35,000 2008-2009; renewed in the amount of $25,295 2010-2012; total grant amount 2006-2012: $160, 295

Selected Publications

Books

  • Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos, Brandeis University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2025.
  • Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848. Brandeis University Press. (Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry). 2014.
    • A Russian edition translated by Golda Kukuyevitsky is forthcoming with Academic Studies Press

Journal Special Issues

  • Lessons and Legacies XVII: Languages of the Holocaust (co-editor with Jennifer Gedes), in progress
  • Guest Editor, Ambivalent Sites of Memory in Postwar Germany (New German Critique 112 / 38:1, 2011)

Selected Essays

  • “Ethics in Collapse: The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of Yitskhok Bernshteyn.” Forthcoming in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 
  • “Holocaust Literature and Autorevision: Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written in, and Rewritten after, the Lodz Ghetto.” In geveb: a Journal of Yiddish Studies, March 2023: https://ingeveb.org/articles/holocaust-literature-and-autorevision.
  •  “A Poetics of Genocide: The Jewish Dead Confront their German Murderers in Itzhak Katzenelson’s Warsaw Ghetto Poem ‘Vey dir.’” Nexus: Essays in German-Jewish Studies, Vol. 5, Moments of Enlightenment: In Memory of Jonathan M. Hess, ed. Eric Downing and Ruth von Bernuth (2021): 135-163. 
  • “Piotr Rawicz's Le Sang du ciel, Heidegger, and the Holocaust as Ontological Experience.” Comparative Literature 70:2 (June 2018): 194-217
  •  “Writing Hunger in a Modernist Key in the Warsaw Ghetto: Leyb Goldin’s ‘Chronicle of a Single Day,’" forthcoming in Jewish Social Studies.
  • “Oskar Rosenfeld, the Lodz Ghetto, and the Chronotope of Hunger,” forthcoming in The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger, ed. Manisha Basu and Anastasia Ulanowicz. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017
  • “Wissenschaft des Judentums, Freedom, and Hegel’s State.” AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies. The Freedom Issue (Fall 2016): 46-47
  • "The Oyneg Shabes Archive and the Cold War: The Case of Yehoshue Perle’s Khurbn Varshe," New German Critique 112 / 38:1 (Winter 2011): 181-215
  • “Remembering Dora Bruder: Patrick Modiano’s Surrealist Encounter with the Postmemorial Archive,” Postmodern Culture 18:2 (January 2008)
  • “Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and the Ambivalence of French-Jewish Identity,” French Studies LXI, no. 4 (October 2007): 476-491
  • “Auschwitz as Hermeneutic Rupture, Differend, and Image malgré tout: Jameson, Lyotard, Didi-Huberman.” Visualizing the Holocaust, ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House Press, 2008, 114-137
  • “Lazarus Bendavid’s and J. G. Fichte’s Kantian Fantasies of Jewish Decapitation in 1793,” Jewish Social Studies13.3 (Spring/Summer 2007): 73-102
  • “The Funny Business of the Swedish East India Company: Gender and Imperial Joke-Work in Jacob Wallenberg’s Travel Writing,” Eighteenth Century Studies 33 (Winter 2000): 217-232
    • Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, volume 77 (Gale, 2002): 325-334
  • "Goethe’s Splitting Image: Writing and/as (Male) Sexuality in ‘Das Tagebuch’ and Beyond," Goethe Yearbook 9 (1999): 131-157

Current Projects

My current book project examines real-time reflections by victims of the Holocaust on the tortured status of ethical frameworks in the face of the extreme violence and, ultimately, genocide they were witnessing. One portion of this study, “Ethics in Collapse: The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of Yitskhok Bernshteyn,” is forthcoming in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.