Aaron Carpenter (he/him/his)

Before coming to the University of Washington, Aaron taught English in Qingdao, China and Innsbruck, Austria.

His main areas of academic interest are minority literature in both Austria and Germany, as well as literature from German minority groups in non-German-speaking countries, such as South Tyrol in Italy. He would like to explore how someone or a country to be multilingual and how this might express itself in literature or art.

Since coming to the University of Washington, he has become interested in what various German philosophers and playwrights, specifically Nietzsche and Brecht, think the purpose of Greek tragedy is or should be.

In March 2015, he gave a presentation called “Challenging the National Linguistic Narrative” at the Austrian Studies Conference in Detroit about a bilingual education program in Vienna where students of migrant background learned to read and write in both German and their native language.

He is a recipient of the Joff Hanauer for Excellence in Western Civilization Graduate Fellowship in 2020-21.