Brian Hensley is a doctoral candidate in the department of Germanic Studies pursuing his PhD in Modern German Literature and Culture. He was a visiting researcher at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands during the summer of 2024. Before coming to Bloomington, Brian earned both a B.S. and M.A. in German from the University of Kentucky. As an undergraduate, Brian also spent a year at the Universität Heidelberg in Germany.
Brian’s areas of interest include psychoanalysis, medical humanities, history of psychiatry, history of medicine, and philosophy of science.
In his dissertation, he examines the role of nervousness as both a psychological and social phenomena of the time between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century in German-speaking Europe. For Brian, the importance of this project is the investigation of the relationship between culture and mental phenomena through a historical lens which allows us to examine these same issues in our own times. While Nervosität was the popular metaphor of its day to explain all sorts of societal ills and maladies, today’s world has its own metaphors.
The current chapter in-progress looks at how naturopathic movements (Naturheilkunde) in Germany via figures such as Adolf Just advocated for a return to living a “natural life” as a reaction to the rapidly changing conditions of the early twentieth century.
Outside of this project, Brian has also presented on the influence of psychoanalysis in the works of Franz Kafka, Freud’s social theory in the context of Red Vienna, and the role of melancholia and storytelling in Anna Seghers’ Überfahrt.
Brian’s work as a translator can be seen in the PBS documentary I’m The Girl: The Story of a Photograph (2022, dir.: Thomas Southerland), for which he transcribed and translated an interview segment from German to English. In 2025, he co-authored a translation of Niklas Luhmann’s “Klassische Theorie der Macht” (“Classical Theory of Power”) with Claire Richters.
Brian has taught German language courses at the beginning and intermediate levels at University of Kentucky and Indiana University Bloomington. Additionally, he has assisted in larger content-courses with themes focusing on horror films and fairy tales. Through his pedagogical interests, he has researched the impact of emotions in the classroom, specifically how the emotions of stress and anxiety impact the individual learner’s ability in the second-language classroom and how this affects group dynamic in the classroom. This research culminated in a presentation at the University of Alabama Language Conference in early 2020.
Outside of academia, Brian likes petting street cats, watching David Lynch films, listening to Turkish psychedelic rock, and bouldering.
The College of Arts