Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies Faculty

Daniel Bowles

Associate Professor, German Studies

Photo of Daniel Bowles

Daniel Bowles

Ph.D.

Contact

Lyons Hall Room 201C

Telephone: 617-552-1594

Email: daniel.bowles@bc.edu

ORCID 0000-0003-4444-9494

Education

  • B.S., Vanderbilt University
  • A.M., Harvard University
  • Ph.D., Harvard University

Courses

GERM1601: Perspectives on Art: Expression and Explosion
GERM1701: Constructing Deviance: Madmen, Hysterics, & Criminals
GERM2001: German Composition and Conversation I
GERM2002: German Composition and Conversation II
GERM2003: Fantastic Tales of Horror and Ghosts
GERM2163: Triumphant Calamity: The Modern Condition
GERM2222: Madmen, Hysterics, & Criminals: Inventing Deviance
GERM2242: Germany Divided and Reunited
GERM3006: Kindheit und Krise

Research Interests

Postwar and contemporary literature and culture, satire and genre studies, intertextuality, gender studies, literary theory, the fantastic, madness, modernism, music and literature.

Office hours

By appointment 

Profile

My work—both research projects and literary translations—generally 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)

  • Uwe Wittstock, MARSEILLE 1940 (Polity, forthcoming 2025)
  • Philipp Felsch, HOW NIETZSCHE CAME IN FROM THE COLD (Polity, 2024)
  • Christian Kracht, EUROTRASH (Liveright, 2024)
  • Uwe Wittstock, FEBRUARY 1933: THE WINTER OF LITERATURE (Polity, 2023)
  • Christian Kracht, “The Gold Coast,” in The Paris Review 241 (Fall 2022): 187–215
  • 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–May 2022
  • Max Geilinger Translation Grant, awarded by Übersetzerhaus Looren, July–August 2017
  • Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Christian Kracht’s Imperium, 2016
  • Harvard College Fellow, 2012–2013
  • Whiting Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2010–2011
  • Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, 2009–2010
  • Jack M. Stein Teaching Fellow Prize in German for excellence in teaching, Harvard University, 2008
  • Fulbright Research Grant, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, 2003–2004
  • Phi Beta Kappa, Vanderbilt University, 2003
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