Dominik studied media studies and philosophy in Vienna and New York before joining the Ph.D. program at NYU German in the fall of 2013. In his dissertational research, he explores the problem of finitude in the work of Franz Kafka and the intellectual context of the early 20th century.
Dominik has edited a special issue of Modern Language Notes on the problem of prizes and prize acceptance speeches, and has published essays on Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka, and Friedrich Kittler. He has been a visiting student and attended summer and winter schools at the Universities of Basel, Bern, and Zürich, at LMU Munich and FU Berlin, at the IKKM in Weimar as well as the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. Together with Werner Hamacher, Dominik organized the conference The Pains of Language at Deutsches Haus at NYU in April 2016.
Currently, he is working on a collected volume on Walter Benjamin’s early work on educational critique and the politics of pedagogy. He was also awarded the Young Scholars Prize of the International Walter Benjamin Society for his research on Benjamin’s early writings. Furthermore, he is the recipient of NYU’s Outstanding Teaching Award and the Otto Mainzer Fellowship. And for the 2018-19 academic year, Dominik has been awarded the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities. He is the organizer of multiple GSA and ACLA panels and seminars, and has presented his research on numerous occasions, in the U.S. and abroad.