Alexander Sorenson
Assistant Professor of German
German and Russian Studies
Background
Alexander Sorenson is an assistant professor of German Studies and founding organizer of the Environmental Humanities Working Group at Binghamton University. His research and teaching interests center upon interdisciplinary themes and issues related to the German literary, intellectual and aesthetic tradition from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.
His first book, The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism (Cornell University Press, 2024), examines the relationship between water imagery, law and sacrifice in Poetic Realism. He is currently working on a second project, tentatively titled Ecologies of Transience, which explores the poetic, philosophical and theological antecedents of modern environmental consciousness.
Publications of his have appeared in The German Quarterly, Literature & Theology, Forum for Modern Language Studies, German Life & Letters and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has also been a guest on the 1869 and Entitled Opinions podcasts.
Education
- PhD, University of Chicago
- MA, University of Chicago
- BA (summa cum laude), Portland State University
Research Interests
- German literature, culture and thought ca. 1780-1917
- Modern European intellectual history
- Philosophical, theological and cultural accounts of nature
- Convergences between the natural and human sciences
Teaching Interests
- German language and literature
- European and comparative literature, culture, thought (Enlightenment—Expressionism)
- Environmental Humanities