Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian Studies, German
Chet Lisiecki received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon in 2014. His research focuses broadly on intersections of politics and literature, with a primary focus on comparative modernisms and fascism studies. His secondary interests include queer studies (specifically queer German literature and film), affect theory, and German colonialism. He has published on the Nietzschean influence on Imagist aesthetics, the liberatory and anti-totalitarian potential of Hannah Arendt’s council system, and the politics of “inner emigration” poetry in the context of the so-called “conservative revolution” and Nazi fascism. He is currently preparing two articles for publication. The first article considers the fascist dynamics and racializing dimensions of cultural pessimism in Peter Sloterdijk’s Rules for the Human Zoo (1999) and Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), focusing specifically on the debates and critical commentary surrounding these texts. The second article performs a close reading of Raoul Peck’s experimental docuseries from 2021, Exterminate All the Brutes, arguing that the films create “affective knowledges” of colonialism and fascism that challenge persistent narratives and provide the groundwork for new pedagogical approaches to these topics.
Chet is currently the Project Coordinator for Colorado College's "Humanities For All Times" Grant sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.
