I’m currently a Lecturer in the Discipline of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I teach the Contemporary Civilization sequence in the Core Curriculum. I earned my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota in 2025, where I designed and taught about a dozen undergraduate courses on literary modernism, the culture wars, the campus novel, world literature, and beyond. I also hold degrees from the School of Visual Arts and Bard College.

Most of my research deals with early twentieth-century German literature and the history of the human sciences. My book project is provisionally titled “Unpolitical Theory: Cultural Studies in Weimar Germany.” It examines a community of scholars at the end of the First World War who rebelled against the disenchanting effects of modern disciplinary scholarship by positing an alternative theoretical foundation for the study of culture. Although long dismissed as proto-fascist pseudoscience, I defend this interwar transvaluation of theoretical values as a forgotten avenue for humanistic scholarship while disambiguating its association with reactionary political theory. The project’s central figures are Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Oswald Spengler, Friedrich Gundolf, Erich Kahler, Alfred Weber, Max Scheler, and Walter Benjamin.

My reconstruction of a legendary debate between Spengler and Weber will appear soon in New German Critique; I have also written an essay on the American reception of Spengler for Compact Magazine. I am currently working on two public-facing essays–one on Stefan George and another on Alfred Seidel–as well as a translation of a selection from Spengler’s Decline of the West.

I’ve also written a number of articles on Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the reception of Marxism in Anglo-American academia. This includes: a critique of Louis Althusser’s interpretation of Marx in Radical Philosophy; a response to my critics, also in Radical Philosophy; a translation of a 1968 confrontation between Alfred Schmidt and Nicos Poulantzas in Frankfurt along with an introduction in Historical Materialism; a meditation on Theodor Adorno’s sex life in Telos; some critiques of the concept of “totality” and “late capitalism” in Qui Parle and Compact; and more.

Contact: kb3615@columbia.edu