Arne De Boever is a PhD-candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in New York. He studied German and English literature and linguistics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and the Universität Leipzig (Germany) and holds an MA and MPhil from Columbia. He has published articles on Durs Grünbein, W.G. Sebald, and Giorgio Agamben and has written texts for the Transidency art and theory collective in Berlin. His dissertation is a study of the contemporary novel and the state of exception and traces the relations between literature, life, and politics in the aftermath of September 11.