Michael Stern received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He regularly teaches courses in the Scandinavian and German sections of the department, and the Humanities program. His course materials include literature, film, and philosophy from the Scandinavian, German, and African traditions. His courses use these texts to address the relationship between description and the construction of “reality;” in other words, the manner in which aesthetic cultures create and challenge notions of identity, right behavior, deviance, progress, and the like are in play in every course Stern teaches. Recent courses include Repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud, Neither Here nor There: Africa and “otherness,” The Singing Socrates, and Growing Pains: Depictions of Childhood, the teenage Years, and Early Adulthood in Scandinavian Cinema.

Stern is the author of a book entitled Nietzsche’s Ocean, Strindberg’s Open Sea and he has written on Ingmar Bergman, Søren Kierkegaard, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jewish Literature in Scandinavia. He is currently working on two book length projects. The first, The Singing Socrates, analyzes the appropriation of the figure of Socrates by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and how Socratic irony regulates each thinkers understanding of the possibilities for a philosophy of praxis. The second project is a comparative study of European and African notions of progress as expressed in the philosophical literature from both continents. Other research interests include the works of Ousmane Sembene, Djibril Diop Mambety, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Karl Marx, Vendela Hebbe, and August Strindberg; of course, these interest include all the various abstractions that one can derive from viewing the films and texts these authors produce.