Profile
Professor Dawson received his PhD in German from Vanderbilt University, his MA from the University of California, Berkeley and his BA from Davidson College. Before coming to Hunter in 2024, he taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Maryland. He has studied, researched, or led student programs in Würzburg, Vienna, Wiesbaden, and Berlin.
He researches German and (especially) Austrian literature from the 19th century to the present, focusing on environmental humanities and sound studies. He has published articles on Austrian rap music, multilingualism in German studies, the cross section of environmental and digital humanities, and on Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr as a poet of the Anthropocene. He is currently at work on a translation of some rather ribald early novellas by Felix Salten, the author of Bambi.