Mercer Greenwald

Mercer Greenwald's dissertation examines contemptuous and contemptible humanistic characters in German literature of the 20th centuries with the hope of better understanding the role of the humanities today. The dissertation asks how literature reflects and resists notions of stupidity, intelligence, pretension, and pedagogy in the institutional context, focusing on works by Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Efriede Jelinek.

Research Methods: textual analysis, reception history, social and historical analysis.

Areas of Interest: psychoanalysis, comparative mysticisms, disability studies, discourses of fluidity and transformation, the voice, free and impeded speech, notions of stupidity and pretension, the romantic-era consumer, paraliterary pedagogy, contemporary literary consumption, the performance of literary criticism, the reception of German social thought in Brazil, multilingual literature and literature between languages, rhythm and repetition, music and opera

Languages- German (near-native), English (native), Portuguese (beginner-intermediate).

Education- Harvard University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures (A.M., 2025); Bard College Conservatory of Music (B.A. German Studies, B.M. Viola Performance, 2022).