Overview
Before coming to Duke, Sarah Pourciau (Ph.D. 2007, Princeton University) held positions at Stanford University, Princeton University, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. Her research explores the intersections of philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth-century German and Austrian culture. Related areas of interest include the history of theology, literary theory and aesthetics, gender theory, opera, and the history of science and mathematics. Her first book, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science (Fordham, 2017), traces the nineteenth-century emergence and twentieth-century transformation of a structuralist approach to language and poetics, teasing out the pivotal role played by the system-transcending concept of Sprachgeist. Her current book project is provisionally entitled The Meaning of Deep Computation. It explores the emergence of contemporary deep learning techniques and the history of vector space geometries as a series of encounters between mathematics and philosophy, computation and semiotics, symbols and meaning, from the early 19th century to the present. Pourciau's articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals like Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, The Opera Quarterly, POETICA, Modern Language Notes, Germanic Review, and Arcadia.
