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I am a writer and researcher interested in modern German-Jewish thought and critical theories of mourning, doing my PhD between Goethe University of Frankfurt and University of Lille. Much of my work is based on collaboration across disciplines, including reading groups and publication projects with artists, religious historians, philosophers, and game designers. My academic research particularly deals with Susan Taubes and Gillian Rose. I explore how their examinations of mourning and extreme violence between autobiographical fiction and philosophy connect to current thought on loss, mourning, and grief in critical theory. I write widely and para-academically, ranging from book reviews and criticism to prose, fiction, and comics. For NBN's Biography channel, I focus on both experimental play with the biography genre and challenging and unusual lives.
Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher interested in modern Jewish thought, critical theories of mourning, and the boundaries of biographical writing.
Traces of Enayat (Transit Books, 2023) is a work of creative nonfiction tracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroin…
Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Vintage, 2024) is a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. When Suzanne Scanlon was a student a…
Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024) is an experimental biography of the ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood that reveals the tenuous relationship …
Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an un…