Rachel Shuetman Wong is a dual Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Germanic Studies. Originally trained in Classics and East Asian Media Studies, she brings a multidisciplinary approach to her work in classical German aesthetics and its transmedial afterlives. Her dissertation, Aesthetic Reconciliation: Configuring Art and History from Schiller to the New Left, investigates the tension between naïve spontaneity and self-alienated reflection that lies at the heart of Schiller’s aesthetic humanism. By exploring how the antinomies of poetic self-consciousness inform modern notions of genre, historicity, and political violence, her project finds Schillerian aesthetics at work in texts as varied as Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, and Rancière’s Fables cinématographiques. In her teaching, she combines approaches developed in writing and language pedagogy to design courses that speak to contemporary issues in blue ecocriticism and transnational media studies. Her work, which has been supported by grants from DAAD and Fulbright, has been recognized with a 2023 Quadrille Scholarship from the Germanistic Society of America and a 2024 Prawer Lectureship from the English Goethe Society.
Beyond research and teaching, Rachel is an enthusiastic mentor for first-generation students from a diversity of backgrounds. She also enjoys writing and translating for a broader audience: her translations of Hegel and Max Planck are forthcoming in edited volumes, and her literary journalism has appeared in The Point, Mekong Review, Myanmore, The Crimson, and Harvard Political Review.