Jason Groves

Project Description

 Associate Professor of German Studies

Ph.D. Yale University (2012)

Faculty Profile

Jason Groves is an associate professor of German Studies at the University of Washington, where he is also a core faculty member in the Environmental Cultures and Values minor. His research interests encompass literature and art in German romanticism and realism, Jewish German literature, especially post-Holocaust poetry, literary theory, cultural criticism, memory studies, and trauma studies, particularly in the context of historical and ongoing ecological crises.

His monograph, “The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary“, appeared with Fordham University Press in 2020, and he is currently working on a book project on remembering the Holocaust in the Anthropocene. A sketch of that project can be found on the blog of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum scholarly collective, of which he is a member, under the title: “How Might Memory Studies Matter Today?” Part of this project also includes a special journal issue that he is co-editing on “Reading Paul Celan Today.” His research has appeared in academic journals including Colloquia Germanica, Goethe Yearbook, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Performance Research, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, The Global South, and Modern Language Notes.

He is the translator of Sonja Neef’s “The Babylonian Planet: Culture and Encounter Under Globalization” (Bloomsbury, 2021) as well as Werner Hamacher’s For—Philology (in: Minima Philologica, Fordham UP, 2015). In addition to his work as a professional translator, he has developed a community-based learning project for German Studies students to gain course credit for translating documents from the archives of Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity.

Since 2019 he has co-organized the Colloquium on Transcultural Approaches to Europe and from 2016-2019 he co-organized the Cross-disciplinary Research Cluster on the Anthropocene, both funded by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Media coverage of his courses and organized events includes “Hidden Seattle Inspires Research” (Nancy Joseph, Perspectives Newsletter, September 2018), “Unearthing Seattle’s Deeper Histories through Art and Humanities” (Jonathan Hiskes) “Welcome to the Sixth Extinction” (Nancy Joseph. Perspectives Newsletter, May 2017), and “A Journey to the Center of the Anthropocene” (Jonathan Hiskes).