Michael J. Saman
I am a researcher, teacher, translator, and editor based in Berlin, Germany, and Asheville, North Carolina. I have taught for institutions including Dartmouth College, New York University, Princeton University, UCLA, Brown University, and the College of William & Mary. My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Foundation. I hold a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
My research specializations include modern German intellectual history, German literature since the eighteenth century, and intersections of German and Africana intellectual cultures. My doctoral thesis was on Goethe’s reception of Kant’s philosophy; my current book project, a study of classical German thought in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, is under contract with Northwestern University Press; my future research will turn to the work of the electronic music group Kraftwerk, viewed in the context of twentieth-century German cultural history.
Among my recent publications are “Reason Has Its Epochs: Schiller, Goethe, Golgotha, and the Intertextual Construction of the Absolute in Hegel,” which was awarded the Essay Prize of the Goethe Society of North America for best article of 2022 on eighteenth-century German literature. “Towards Goethean Anthropology: On Morphology, Structuralism, and Social Observation” was awarded the Goethe Society’s Richard Sussman Prize for best article of 2020 on Goethe and science. I am co-editor, with Carl Niekerk, of the Forum “Race, Imperialism, and the Age of Goethe,” which appeared in the 2024 Goethe Yearbook. My entry on Immanuel Kant will appear in the Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts in 2026.
I work as a translator of German to English, and also as an editor in English, with an emphasis on scholarly writing in the humanities. Please contact me to discuss any projects.