Elaine Chen
Harvard University ‘26
Biography
Elaine Chen received her B.A. in German Studies, with
a minor in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, from California
State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in 2016. In 2017, she returned to
complete an M.A. in German Studies; her thesis entitled “A Portrait of
the Artist as a Dead Man: Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig’s Receptions of
Kleist’s Literary Suicide(s)” explores the impact of Kleist’s stories,
life, and death on Mann and Zweig’s relationship as two of the most
prominent Novelle-authors of the 20th century, as well
as on both authors’ works.
Academic
As a scholar and artist, Elaine is interested in the
relationship between the history of science and the development of new
aesthetic and moral-philosophical paradigms; in particular, she focuses
on convergent discourses of science, ethics, and aesthetics at the turns
of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her dissertation
addresses the influence of the discovery of the freshwater polyp on the
development of the concept of Bildung, and correspondingly the Bildungsroman, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Creative
Elaine has completed internships at the
Nationaltheater Mannheim (2015), the Schauspielhaus Salzburg (2017), the
Los Angeles Shakespeare Institute (2018; led by Louis Fantasia and
sponsored by the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles), and the Salzburger
Festspiele (2019; Summer Folk, dir. Evgeny Titov). She also regularly directs for the theater. Recent productions include: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (Theatre Threshold, 2019), Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Tod (CSULB, 2019; with Jeffrey L. High), and Hurricaine Season (Collab24,
2022). For two consecutive summers, she has led the theater workshop at
Die deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik (The German Summer School on the
Pacific) in Portland, Oregon in productions of Heinrich von Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug (2022) and Yvan Goll’s Methusalem: oder der ewige Bürger (2023).
Awards
She is the recipient of the University
Achievement Award for Outstanding Graduate Students in Research,
Scholarly and Creative Activity (CSULB, 2018), a Fulbright Combined
Grant to Salzburg, Austria (2018-2019), the Outstanding German Teaching
Associate and M.A. Thesis Awards (CSULB, 2020), the
Heinrich-von-Kleist-Gesellschaft Award for Best Student Essay on Kleist
(2021), the Bernhard Blume Prizes for First- and Second-Year Coursework
(Harvard University, 2022, 2023), the Esther Sellholm Walz Essay Prize
(Harvard University, 2023), and the Jack M. Stein Prize for Teaching
(Harvard University, 2023; with Therese Shire).
One Rep MaxesBench - 75lbs
Squat - 115lbs
Deadlift - 175lbs