Tommy Goulding

Tommy is a Senior in the German Department, concentrating in Philosophy and Intellectual History. He is interested in the reception of nineteenth-century politics and culture in the writings of both nineteenth and twentieth-century German writers and intellectuals. His Junior Paper, “The Confidence Man Favored By Fortune” traced a new genealogy of fascism in the writings of Walter Benjamin from Benjamin’s reading and adaptation, primarily from texts by Marx, of the French Emperor Napoleon III. In his Senior Thesis, he hopes to continue and expand on this reading of Benjamin in a consideration of the effects of Bonapartism, as a concept and a reality, on the German and European Left of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His interests include nineteenth-century history and politics, Marxism and its afterlives, Freud and psychoanalysis, Kafka, Benjamin and the Benjaminian approach to history, the Paris Commune and its historical reception, Jewish Studies, and literature of all kinds.

On campus, he writes for the Nassau Weekly and writes and produces for WPRB 103.3. He enjoys board games, writing, and the Smiths.