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 Maxes

Bench - 75lbs
Squat - 115lbs
Deadlift - 175lbs

Elaine Chen

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