COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Anne Poetzsch is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies program with a home department in German and a cluster affiliation with the Critical Theory Cluster. Her research focus lies broadly on the intersection of translation studies, immigration and exile as well as trauma studies. She earned her BA in Literature and Chinese from Bennington College in 2026. Her undergraduate thesis examined Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Yoko Tawda’s Das nackte Auge (2004), focusing on the use of the figure of the flâneur in a contemporary transnational context. She is interested in investigating and reinterpreting the German "untranslatable" word Heimat as well as its interpretation in the discourse around borders, migration and "home land" by analyzing how language, space and memory inform one another through the impact of untranslatability.