• Black Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Mixed Race Studies 
• Life Writing 
• Law & Literature 
• Queer Studies / Gender Studies 
• Critical Kinship Studies 

As a senior research and teaching associate at UZH, my work revolves around American studies. While my courses span a range of eras and themes, my research primarily asks how various forms of belonging are forged in and through literature, and how race, gender, class, sexuality and the law shape such attachments.  

I received my MA in American studies as well as Staatsexamen (teaching degree) from JMU Würzburg and earned my doctorate in American studies at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Before coming to Zurich, I was a post-doctoral scholar at the Collaborative Research Center "Law & Literature" (U Münster/U Osnabrück) and also taught at the University of Bremen. Over the course of my academic trajectory, I was a BAA fellow at Yale's Gilder Lehrmann Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and a Fulbright fellow at the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley. I am the review editor for Amerikastudien / American Studies.  

My first book opens with the decriminalization of interracial marriage in 1967 to analyze how Americans sought to culturally legitimize interracial kinship at the turn of the twenty-first century through autobiographical practices (under contract with Wayne State UP). My current book project tracks enslavement as a throughline in the formation of American national literature and traces the ambivalent ways in which German readers identified with American narratives about slavery—from translations of slave narratives in the antebellum era to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind in Nazi Germany. 

• Lecture: “Der politische Kampf um Critical Race Theory,” Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (12/2024) 
• Workshop: “The Properties of Social Justice,” keynotes by Patricia J. Wiliams and Brenna Bhandar, co-organized with Simone Knewitz (08/2024) 
• Roundtable: “Resonanzen: Schwarze Literatur und Lesarten,” Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen (06/2023) 

Publications

Awards

Courses