Arina Rotaru

Arina Rotaru is a Lecturer in the Writing Program, where she teaches Global Perspectives on Culture within the Core Curriculum. She holds a PhD in German studies, with a minor in comparative literature, from Cornell University. Rotaru's other titles include a Magisterio in Facultate Philosophiae, with a specialization in social philosophy of human mobility, from Pontificia Università Urbaniana, Rome, as well as a BA from the University of Bucharest. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, Rotaru taught as a lecturer in German and a faculty associate in the first-year residential experience program at Ithaca College, and she was also a visiting scholar at Cornell University.

Dr. Rotaru's research interests include contemporary German literature and cultural studies, with an emphasis on minority literatures, critical ethnic studies, transnational avant-gardes, Caribbean and German affinities, as well as sound, media and performance studies. Her work has appeared in Forum for Modern Languages (2011) and Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics (2013) and is accepted for publication in TOTArt: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s) and Mass-Society, and Noise, Audition and Aurality. She is currently working on a monograph based on her dissertation entitled, Poetics of Resonance and Legacies of Sound in Contemporary German Literature since 1989.

Dr. Rotaru has held DAAD, Einaudi, and Max Kade Foundation fellowships and has been a fellow of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Cornell University and a group coordinator and member of writing and reading groups sponsored by the Society for the Humanities and the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell.

Research Interests

• Global poetics (East-West encounters)
• Minority and postcolonial literatures
• Avant-gardes
• ​Sound and performance studies

Select Publications

• "May Ayim and Diasporic Poetics," The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 92 (1), Taylor & Francis, 86-107, 2017
• "Totality and Destruction in Contemporary German Culture: Playing on Fascism in the Total Art of Serdar Somuncu," in Totalitarian Arts: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s) and Mass-Society, eds. Mark Epstein, Fulvio Orsitto, and Andrew Righi (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 300-320
• "Yoko Tawada's Kafka Kaikoku: Modernity, Sacrifice, and World Literature," Journal of World Literature, ed.-in-chief David Damrosch, Vol. 2. No. 4 (2017): 454-474
• "Colonial Sounds and Aural Interferences in the Dadaist Sound Poetics of Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara" in Studia Theodisca Vol. 24 (2017)

Education

• PhD, German Studies, Cornell University
• Magisterio, Social Philosophy of Human Mobility, Faculty of Philosophy, Pontificia Università Urbaniana