Alexander Lin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He works primarily on 20th century prose fiction, lyric poetry and criticism in German, Japanese and English, with interests in critical theory, reception of ancient and medieval art and the relation between religion and philosophy. His dissertation project assembles an original, transnational grouping of modern narrative prose focused on encounters with artworks to theorize ekphrastic description as the paradigmatic literary topos for negotiating the problem of the materiality of signs. He was affiliated with the Humboldt University as a Fulbright Fellow in 2022-2023.

Research Project at EXC Temporal Communities:

Ekphrasis as Interruption: Modern Writing Confronts the Fetish of Ancient Art