Daniel Bowles serves as Associate Professor and program director for German Studies at Boston College, where he teaches seminars spanning German literature, film, language and history. He is both the author of The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing (2015; paperback, 2019) and a translator of literary fiction and works of non-fiction, including texts by writers such as Thomas Meinecke, Christian Kracht, Uwe Wittstock, and Philipp Felsch, among others. His English translation of Kracht’s Imperium was awarded the 2016 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2016.

In his scholarly research to date, Bowles has focused on German-language literature and culture since 1945, particularly on literary theories, satire, genre studies, intertextuality and literary historiography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His most recent work combines scholarly investigations of new literature with translations of contemporary novels in order to increase the readership of and access to German-language works in the Anglophone world.

At HIAS, Daniel Bowles will be working on The New German Fantastic, a book project about the recent influx of the fantastic into contemporary German-language novels since roughly 2000—despite its not having played a measurable role in ‘canonical’ German literary history since the early nineteenth century and the age of the fairy tale. His study endeavors to bring to light the historical, social, cultural, and political contexts for this incipient shift in the German literary imagination, and to understand how contemporary authors approach world-building, test the dominance of realist frames, and blaze a trail for new German literature.

His collaboration partner is Cornelia Zumbusch, professor for Modern German Literature at Universität Hamburg.

Bowles’ HIAS fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.