Michael Saman

Michael Saman is a teacher of German language and culture and a researcher in German intellectual history. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has taught for colleges and universities including NYU, Princeton, UCLA, Brown, and William & Mary. His doctoral thesis was on Goethe’s reception of Kant’s philosophy; he is currently preparing a book manuscript on classical German thought in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois; his future research will turn to the work of the electronic music group Kraftwerk, viewed in the context of twentieth-century German politics and cultural history. 
 
Dr. Saman’s research has appeared in journals such as the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte and the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. His recent work on eighteenth-century intellectual history has been recognized with both the annual Essay Prize and the Richard Sussman Prize of the Goethe Society of North America. He is co-editor of the Forum “Race, Imperialism, and the Age of Goethe,” which appears in the 2024 volume of the Goethe Yearbook.
 
Selected Publications
“W.E.B. Du Bois in Berlin, 1926: Political Mourning, the Rise of the Worker, and a Pan-Africanist’s Rethinking of Blackness in Europe,” forthcoming in German Studies Review 47, no. 3 (October 2024)
 
“Race, Imperialism, and German Intellectual History: Reflections Toward a Rethinking of the Canon,” Goethe Yearbook 31 (2024)
 
“Reason Has Its Epochs: Schiller, Goethe, Golgotha, and the Intertextual Construction of the Absolute in Hegel,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 96, no. 1 (March 2022)
 
“Thinking Outside of Philosophy: Goethe, Lévi-Strauss, Propp,” German Quarterly 94, vol. 4 (Fall 2021)
 
“Du Bois and Marx, Du Bois and Marxism,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 17, no. 1 (Spring 2020)
 
“Another, Higher Understanding: Goethe’s Late Kantianism, Makarie, and the Absolutes of Gender in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 94, no. 1 (March 2020)
 
“Towards Goethean Anthropology: On Morphology, Structuralism, and Social Observation”  link Goethe Yearbook 27 (2020)
 
“A Discourse of a Different Kind: On Fabulation and Method in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten” Monatshefte 108, no. 4 (Winter 2016)
 
“Constructions of Goethe Versus Constructions of Kant in German Intellectual Culture, 1900–1925,” Goethe Yearbook 21 (2014)
 
“Senghor’s Other Europe,” Savannah Review 1 (2012)

Contact:
Dr. Michael Saman
German Studies
m.saman[at]berlin.bard.edu