Philip Gerard earned his doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. His doctoral research focused on modern poetry, translation, and historical trauma, with a particular focus on the work of the American poet Ezra Pound and the German-language poet Paul Celan.

Before joining the English Seminar at the UZH, Philip Gerard taught courses in the English Department of the University of Lausanne and the Institute of English Studies at the University of Neuchâtel. Since 2021, he has also been a lecturer in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (D-GESS) at the ETH Zurich, where he gives regular lecture courses on the intersection of literature and technology.

In addition to his academic responsibilities, Philip Gerard is an independent translator from French and German into English. As a translator, teacher, and scholar, he is interested in how machine translation is changing the relationship between writing and culture in our global age.

08/2023 – Translated from French: “The Sovereign, The Survivor, The Last Man” by Marc Nichanien, in Critical Times: Interventions in Critical Theory 6 (1)

12/2022 – Translated from French: The Politics of Time: Imagining African Becomings, edited by Achille Membe and Felwine Sarr, Polity Press (Website)

11/2020 – Introduction to Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive (in collaboration with Robert Kaufman), City Lights Publishers (Website)

01/2020 – “Pound Notes in German Markets: Paul Celan, Usury, and the Postwar Currency of Ezra Pound,” in Modernism/modernity 27 (1).

Academic Writing and Cultural Studies

• Language Skills and Culture: Introduction
• Writing Skills for Research

Literature

• “I, too, sing America”: American Literature and American Citizenship