Our Faculty

Background

Alexander Sorenson is a Lecturer of German and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. His research and teaching interests center upon interdisciplinary themes and issues related to the environmental humanities, such as the interface between philosophy, literature, art, and the history of science. His first book project, based on his doctoral research, examines the relationship between water imagery, law, and sacrifice in Poetic Realism. He is also in the early stages of a second research project about the concept of “sacramental ecology” in the long 19 th century. Along with recent articles derived from this newer work (on the poetry of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Rainer Maria Rilke, respectively), he has also published essays in The German Quarterly, German Life and Letters, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Education

• PhD, University of Chicago 
• MA, University of Chicago
• BA, Portland State University

Research Interests

• German literature and thought ca. 1800-1917
• Literary, philosophical, and artistic accounts of the relation between human communities and the natural world (ecocriticism, nature writing, eco-phenomenology, posthumanism, etc.)
• Modern European intellectual and cultural history
• Convergences between the natural and human sciences

Teaching Interests

• German language and literature
• European literature, culture and thought
• Cultural, literary and critical theory