Writer, translator and scholar Susan Bernofsky, currently based in New York, considers Berlin her second home. Her lifelong fascination with German literature began when she first read the Grimms' fairy tales in the original as a high school student. She takes particular interest in the lines of influence linking eighteenth and nineteenth century German thought to modern and contemporary literature and theater in the German-speaking world and beyond.

 

Her work on the intellectual history of translation connects current translation theory to ideas in Romantic philosophy, drawing on her own expertise as an acclaimed literary translator. Her writings on literature and culture are informed by her experience of living between two
continents and cultures.

 

In teaching, her primary goal is helping students discover their own potential as readers, writers and thinkers. She holds degrees from Princeton University (PhD, Comparative Literature) and Washington University (MFA, Fiction Writing), and has over a decade’s teaching experience.

“As readers we stumble when caught off guard, when the familiar suddenly appears strange and the strange familiar, when words we thought we knew suddenly show us their full range of meaning and words in a foreign tongue prove to be the only possible way to express something we’ve always known.”  

                       - Disoriented Language