Zoë Burgard

Title:

6th Year Graduate School Student

https://campuspress.yale.edu/zoeburgard/

Biography

Zoë joined the Comparative Literature Ph.D. program in 2019. Her primary interests are Early Modern and Modern German, Italian, English, and French Literature. Her research focuses on narrative writing as trauma response, manifestations of self-fashioning, nation building and collapse, and translation studies.

Her dissertation project is entitled “Witness to National Collapse: Early Modern and Modernist Fictions” and explores the work of Ariosto, Grimmelshausen, Svevo, and Musil as reactions to political, religious, and

social schisms in Early Modern and Modern Italy, Germany, and Austria. The project is advised by Katie Trumpener, Jane Tylus, and Rudiger Campe.

She is currently working on an article about Milton’s reception in Musil and Vienna as a Modernist Eden.

From 2020 to 2022, Zoë co-convened the British Studies Colloquium at Yale, including the conception and organization, along with her co-conveners, of the inaugural and then second annual panel on “The Future of British Studies,” which brought together academics from universities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Zoë earned her A.B. in English and French at Harvard, with a minor in Classical Civilizations and a senior thesis on patterns of self-fashioning that respond to disability and physical ailment in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Montaigne’s Essais. She continued her studies with an M.A. in European Literatures at the Humboldt University in Berlin and a Master’s thesis on essayism as life philosophy in Montaigne and in novels by Musil and Svevo. Before arriving at Yale, she spent a year in Genoa, Italy, teaching Italian and English, helping to coordinate study abroad programs, editing manuscripts, and doing marketing and PR work for a wine-consulting business.

Research Interests

Early Modern and Modern German, Italian, French, and English Literature; genre theory (essay and narrative); translation theory; disability studies; New Historicism; trauma theory; nation creation and collapse; Grimmelshausen, Goethe, Döblin, Hartwig, Schnitzler, Kraus, Roth, Musil; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Colonna, Tasso, Nogorola, Svevo, Calvino; Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Shelley (Mary), Alcott, Eliot, Joyce; Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière, Balzac, Zola, Proust.

Working Languages

German, Italian, French, English, Latin

Yale Teaching Experience

ENGL 114: On Disability, Fall 2024 (Instructor of Record)

GERM 110: Elementary German, Spring 2023 (Instructor of Record)

ENGL 114: Troubling Translation, Fall 2022 (Instructor of Record)

LITR 140: How to Compare, Professor Jane Tylus and Abigail Fields, Spring 2022 (TF)

ENGL 154: The Multicultural Middle Ages, Professor Ardis Butterfield and Professor Marcel Elias, Fall 2021 (TF)

Education History

A.B., Harvard College, 2016

M.A., Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2018