Josh Alvizu

Josh Alvizu specializes in 20th Century German and Russian literature, art and film, with emphases on ecology and the intersection of art and politics. He works in particular on Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Kluge. His current book project, Montage Practice: Militant Modernism and the German-Soviet Avant-garde, explores the intellectual cross-fertilization of German and Russian writers, artists, theatre practitioners, and filmmakers in the interwar period. Dr. Alvizu is also developing a second project on the ecological thought of the fin-de-siècle author Paul Scheerbart, about whom he co-organized a panel series at a recent meeting of the German Studies Association. He recently received a grant from the DAAD to participate in its summer faculty seminar, “Literature, Media, Form,” held at Cornell University. Prior to coming to Maryland, Professor Alvizu taught at Roanoke College, at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and at Washington & Lee University. He completed his PhD in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University in 2017. He also holds an MA in German and Romance languages and Literatures from the Johns Hopkins University and a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has lived, studied, or taught abroad in Berlin, Tübingen, Konstanz, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul. At Maryland, Alvizu teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modernism, the avant-garde and the environmental humanities.