Elias Kleinbock

Bio

Elias Kleinbock is a Lecturer in the Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE), a first-year residential humanities program at Stanford University.

His research brings modernist cultural production in the German, Soviet, and Anglophone spheres into conversation with the history of the human sciences and the intersecting traditions of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Spinozism. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, with a dissertation titled “Labors of Formation: Pedagogy and Collectivity in the Modernist Frame.” His current book project, based on his dissertation, traces out a transindividual, psychosocial conception of teaching and learning in works by 20th-century thinkers including Aleksandr Bogdanov, John Dewey, Bertolt Brecht, and Wilfred R. Bion. Elias's broader interests include poetry and poetics, experimental cinema, pre-Freudian histories of the unconscious, and aesthetic and theoretical treatments of impersonality and theatricality. He is also an amateur theater practitioner, with experience and training in clown, commedia, and Lecoq-style physical theater.

Academic Appointments

• Lecturer, Stanford Introductory Studies