Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies Faculty

Daniel Bowles

Associate Professor, German Studies

Profile

My work鈥攂oth research projects and literary translations鈥攇enerally concerns German novels written since roughly 1945. From my first book on satire as a set of writing practices in postwar novels and literary theory, I have turned my focus to elements of the fantastic in contemporary German literature. To date my research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. In my parallel avocation as a literary translator, I have been awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2016 for my rendering of Christian Kracht's Imperium. At Boston College I teach broadly across the field of German Studies (literature, history, culture, language) and in the Core and Perspectives on Art programs.

Selected Publications

Books:

The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing (De Gruyter, 2015)

Recent Articles and Book Chapters (selected):

"Tramps Abroad: Global Nomadism, Narrative Identities and the Novels of Christian Kracht," in The Case of Christian Kracht: Authorship, Irony, and Anything Goes (Brill: Leiden/Boston, 2024)

"Toward a Poetics of the Interview in Thomas Meinecke," Germanic Review 91.1 (2016): 1-16

Recent Translations (selected):

Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold (Polity, forthcoming 2024)

Christian Kracht, Eurotrash (Liveright, forthcoming 2024)

Uwe Wittstock, February 1933: The Winter of Literature (Polity, 2023)

Christian Kracht, 鈥淭he Gold Coast,鈥 in The Paris Review 241 (Fall 2022): 187鈥215

Christian Kracht, The Dead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)

Christian Kracht, Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

Thomas Meinecke, Pale Blue (AmazonCrossing, 2012)

Selected Awards

  • Research grant for Spring 2025, awarded by the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS)

  • Faculty Fellowship, awarded by Boston College, September 2021鈥揗ay 2022

  • Max Geilinger Translation Grant, awarded by 脺bersetzerhaus Looren, July鈥揂ugust 2017

  • Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator鈥檚 Prize for Christian Kracht鈥檚 Imperium, 2016

  • Harvard College Fellow, 2012鈥2013

  • Whiting Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2010鈥2011

  • Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship, Humboldt-Universit盲t zu Berlin, Germany, 2009鈥2010

  • Jack M. Stein Teaching Fellow Prize in German for excellence in teaching, Harvard University, 2008

  • Fulbright Research Grant, Freie Universit盲t Berlin, Germany, 2003鈥2004

  • Phi Beta Kappa, Vanderbilt University, 2003