About
Nathan Bailey is a doctoral student in the department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at University of Michigan.
He graduated magna cum laude from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2024 with a B.A. in Languages, Cultures, and International Studies, specializing in German. While at SIUC, he also completed a minor in philosophy. He has taught German to students at three high schools under the direction of the Goethe-Institut's SPARK for German outreach initiative, and studied in Ulm, Baden-Württemberg as a foreign exchange student in 2016.
He wrote an undergraduate honors thesis titled “Fritz Lang’s Critique of Capitalism through Body Language in Metropolis,” which evaluates relationships between the human body and structures of class inequality in Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expressionist silent film, Metropolis.
His research is interested in rearticulating the complex entanglements of body, movement, space, and time throughout German film history. He approaches the film works of directors such as Ulrike Ottinger and Rainer Werner Fassbinder with the intention of asserting resistance against hegemonic masculinity and the ever-growing "manosphere ideologies" circulating social media platforms today. The pathos of his academic work is interested in how queer epistemology disrupts the dominant architecture of social organization. His academic work is additionally influenced by his personal interests in performativity, metacognition, chrononormativity / temporality, post-hermeneutics, and neuroqueer identity.
In his free time, he enjoys the entropic compositional works of Philip Glass, environmental activism, Stephen King's horror literature, and spending time with beloved friends and family.
