Employing the concept of radical diversity as a starting point and his own positionality as literary translator, Dr. Jon Cho-Polizzi's keynote address investigates projects of colidarity in the contemporary German literary scene through a combination of personal interviews and comparative analyses. He posits these constellations of authorial statements as a form of polyphonic authority which, in conversation with numerous published statements and public acts of solidarity between authors, provide an intimate glimpse into the changing role of literary kinship among authors as public intellectuals despite our age of heightened censorship and increased fractionalization.

Speaker: Dr. Jon Cho-Polizzi

Dr. Jon Cho-Polizzi is an educator, activist, and freelance literary translator, and a Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan. Cho-Polizzi received his PhD in German and Medieval Studies from UC Berkeley after studying Translation, History, and Literature in Heidelberg and Santa Cruz. He lives and works between Ann Arbor, Northern California, and Berlin.