Anne Dymek

Anne C. Dymek received her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and an earlier Ph.D. in Film Studies from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Before joining Tulane University as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, she held teaching appointments at Harvard University and at universities in France, Germany, and Iraq.

Research Interests

Dymek’s research is organized around a fundamental question: how does language shape what a mind can perceive, imagine, and think? Her work brings together the philosophy of language and mind, literary theory, poetics, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and media theory. Across these fields, she approaches language not as a transparent instrument but as a formative practice that structures experience and makes thinking possible.

Her first doctorate, in film philosophy at the Sorbonne, examined film as a perceptual and semiotic medium through the work of Charles S. Peirce. Her second doctorate, in literary theory at Harvard, developed a formal theory of language through Aristotle, medieval speculative grammar, Immanuel Kant, and Peirce, and explored its relation to literary imagination and cognition. This philosophical account now informs her work on the intersections of language, the brain, and artificial systems.

Dymek is completing Hölderlin’s Patmos: Language of Revelation (Routledge, forthcoming 2027) and is working on We Transformers: A New Theory of Language, a book that brings her philosophical theory of language into dialogue with contemporary research in neuroscience and language technologies.

Teaching

At Tulane University, Dymek’s teaching spans comparative literature, German, philosophy of language and mind, and media studies. In Fall 2026, she will introduce Your Brain on Poetry, an interdisciplinary seminar that brings together literary theory, philosophy of language, cognitive science, and neuroscience to explore how poetry shapes human thought and imagination.

Previously, at Harvard University, Dymek taught in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. Her courses included The Self in German Idealism, From Brains to Large Language Models, and Your Brain on Poetry. She has also taught Great Books of Modern World Civilizations at the American University of Iraq, Sulaymaniyah, as well as courses in philosophy, film, and media theory at universities in Germany and France.

Dymek has received several Derek Bok Certificates of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University.

Selected Publications

Books

• Hölderlin’s Patmos: Language of Revelation. Routledge. Forthcoming (2027).
• Cinéma et sémiotique: Deleuze en question. Le Bord de L’Eau, 2015.

Journal Publications

• “Language of Revelation, Language of Broken Perception: On Psycholinguistic Strategies in Hölderlin’s Patmos.” Monatshefte 117, no. 2 (2025).
• “Toucher aux limites du filmique: Images du monde visionnaire (1963).” (with Vincent Lowy). Cahiers Louis-Lumière 11 (2018).
• “Perception, Dreams, Films: Iconicity and Indexicality in Peirce’s Theory of Perception.” Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 33 (2016).
• “L’iconicité filmique: Un métalangage de la perception?” Signata: Annales des sémiotiques, Que peut le métalangage? Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2013.