Eric Jarosinski

Eric Jarosinski (1971) is an American Germanist and author. Jarosinski writes under the nom de plume NeinQuarterly on the social networking site Twitter, where he writes linguistic and philosophical aphorisms, keeping to the 140-character limit. Jarosinski writes in German, Dutch and English. Jarosinski began tweeting in 2012 and soon had a significant following (with nearly 140,000 followers as of 2016). He has since made the jump to the print with a weekly column in German weekly Die Zeit and also in Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad. Jarosinski's first book Nein. A Manifesto was released in 2015.

Background

Jarosinski grew up in Park Falls, Wisconsin. As a child he had some exposure to the German language (Wisconsin having a large number of German Americans), but the interest in German culture and language really evolved after following a high school romantic interest there. He consequently took up studies at the universities of Bonn, Frankfurt and Freiburg. He also studied at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, where he learned Dutch. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2005.

In 2007, he took up a position as Assistant Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Pennsylvania he researched the Frankfurt School and did textual analysis of the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Jarosinski also treated works by Marx, Nietzsche and Kafka. In Spring of 2013 he withdrew his application for tenure. He joined Twitter in January 2012, and in the process became one of the first writers to use the smartphone as his primary writing instrument.