Aviv Hilbig-Bokaer works on literature and visual culture from the early 1900s with a focus on the Mann family and Weimar-era performance. He received his BA summa cum laude from Clark University in Comparative Literature and International Development with high honors. For his work in comparative literature, he was awarded the J. Fanin King Memorial Award as well as a LEEP Fellowship to research and write for a summer in Siberia and Eastern Russia in 2016.
In the years before joining the department at NYU, Aviv worked as a teacher via a Fulbright Fellowship in Vienna, Austria. In 2020 he was a Research Fellow at the State Library of Berlin where he did archival work on Klaus Mann’s theatre criticism from the early 1920s.
His most recent work on Erika Mann and anti-fascist cabaret is being supported by a short-term research fellowship from the DAAD in cooperation with Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His paper, “A Public Diagnosis: Destabilizing Scandal, Anxiety, and Medicine in Klaus Mann’s Barred Window” was awarded Honorable Mention for the Best Graduate Research Paper at the 2020 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Conference.
Apart from German, Aviv is an avid swimmer and consumer of Scandinavian cinema.