Sophie Duvernoy is a literary translator and scholar focusing on the literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar Republic. She received her PhD in German Literature from Yale University in 2023, and is the English translator of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers (November 2025, New York Review Books) and Käsebier Takes Berlin (New York Review Books, 2019). She is co-editor of the academic volume Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film (Bloomsbury Press, 2023), and her writing and translations have appeared in Modern Language Notes, The Paris Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Man’s Land, and The Offing.
At KWI Essen, she will work on her first book project, entitled Liberal Forms: Cultural Critique and Reportage in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. Liberal Forms examines the nineteenth-century German-Jewish tradition of cultural analysis to demonstrate how this intellectual tradition gave rise to the aesthetic strategies of the feuilleton in the Weimar Republic. It examines a cast of characters from the nineteenth-century reformers Aron Bernstein and Moritz Lazarus to the cultural critic Georg Simmel, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the young Georg Lukács, and the writers Siegfried Kracauer and Gabriele Tergit. Putting into conversation academic and public-facing writers, essayists and philosophers, Liberal Forms argues that the project of cultural critique was not confined to the ivory tower but was a shared public discourse in the first fifty years of the German state, as competing visions of the public sphere and political systems fought fiercely with one another.