A.B. (Princeton, 2015), M.A. (Cornell, 2019), Ph.D. (Cornell, 2023).

Juan-Jacques [ JJ ] Aupiais's research focuses on transnational approaches to German literature with particular attention to two thematic complexes: on the one hand, literary multilingualism and translational poetics, and on the other, the historical manifestation and contestation of colonial culture in language. At the nexus of these interests, his dissertation adapted Caribbean cultural theory's concept of creolization to grasp transhistorical affinities in the cultural function of multilingual writing practices, particularly as they shape or shift language identity in relation to coloniality. Looking at texts written "in" and beyond German, this project put forward a comparative analysis of the ways in which multilingual writing practices construct(ed) or contest(ed) colonial culture in the writings of Hans Grimm and Hendrik Witbooi (writing in the colonial contact zone of Southern Africa in the early twentieth century) as well as Yoko Tawada and Sharon Dodua Otoo (writing in a diverse and globalizing postcolonial Germany today). This work forms the basis of JJ's first book project, currently in preparation.

In addition, JJ's research approaches the intersections between post- and decolonial theory and the tradition of German critical theory. He has published on the implications of this intersection for narratives of globalization and rhetorical "[de]colonization[s] of time" (Mignolo) in Alexander Kluge's twenty-first century writing. A second article, forthcoming, analyzes Kluge's theorization and literary practice of collection as a critique both of capitalist accumulation and extraction and of necropolitical practices of erasure under colonial and neocolonial relations.

JJ's research has been supported by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA) in Marbach, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

At OSU, JJ teaches general undergraduate courses on German culture and literature, as well as more specialized courses related to his research focus at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In Spring 2024, he is teaching GERMAN 3102: News and Views, an undergraduate course on the representation of current affairs in the German media, as well as GERMAN 8200: Approaches to German Colonialism, a graduate-level overview of key recent scholarship on German colonialism and its global legacies.