Dr. Zoë Burgard

My name is Zoë Burgard, and I graduated with my PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in May 2026. I am a Lecturer in German Studies at Smith College, in the Department of German and Italian.

My research interests are Early Modern and Modern German, Italian, English, and French literature. My research focuses on narrative writing as trauma response, manifestations of self-fashioning, critical disability studies, nation building and collapse, and translation studies.

My dissertation was entitled “Witness to Collapse: Early Modern and Modernist Fictions” and explored works by Ariosto, Grimmelshausen, Svevo, and Musil as reactions to political, religious, and social schisms in Early Modern and Modern Italy, Germany, and Austria. It was advised by Professors Katie Trumpener, Rüdiger Campe, and Jane Tylus. My working languages are English, German, Italian, French, and Latin, and I have extensive experience teaching language, literature, and composition.

^{L: 1588 edition of Montaigne’s Essais,
taken on site in Bordeaux, October 2023}

^{R: Population records, taken on site at the
Archivio di Stato in Ferrara, November 2023}