Alex Beatty

Alex Beatty joined the German Department in the fall of 2023. His research interests include epistemology, historiography, and poetry. He is also a translator, most recently of To See a Woman, a novella by the Swiss author, essayist, and journalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and has previously translated authors from the 17th to the 21st century, including Johannes Keppler, Jakob von Uexküll, and Juliane Rebentisch.

He holds a Frelinghuysen Fellowship for the year 2024-25, and was previously the recipient of a University Center for Human Values Prize. Prior to his PhD studies at Princeton, he was a double major in Written Arts and German Studies at Bard College. After graduating in 2019, he worked for the Robert B. Silvers Foundation — a non-profit organization supporting writers of long-form literary criticism, essays, and journalism — as assistant to Daniel Mendelsohn, director of the RBSF, and later assisted Mendelsohn in his role as Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books.

Alex’s translations of essays in the fields of ethology and zoo-semiotics have been supported by Curtin University, under the direction of Professor Matthew Chrulew, Series Editor of “Animalities” for Edinburg University Press. His work has also been supported by an Australian Discovery Grant.

In 2025, Alex was a co-organizer of “Mysticism & Modernism: The World of Margarete Susman,” the first conference in North America dedicated to Margarete Susman (1872-1966).

In addition to German Studies, Alex’s interests include Slavic, Romance, and Anglophone literature.

Conferences Organized:

“Mysticism & Modernism: The World of Margarete Susman,” February 2025, (Co-organizer with Fabia Weisser and Jonah Estabrook)

Conference Participation:

“Poetics of Perception: What Is It Like to be a Human?”, presented at “Making Sense of Experience: Analyses of Sensation After Mach”, Yale University, April 2024

“The Stone of Werder: Jakob von Uexküll at the End of Life”, presented at “Contemporary Umwelt Analysis: Applications for Culture and Ecological Relations”, University of Tartu, Estonia, April 2023

“The Stone of Werder: Jakob von Uexküll’s Spiderweb Story”, presented at “Ethopower & Ethography”, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, November 2019