•    Hip Hop Studies
•    Sentimentality, Affect, and Public Feeling
•    Gender Studies and Feminist Theory
•    African American Culture and Literature
•    Latinx Culture and Literature
•    Interamerican Studies

I am a teaching and research assistant at Prof. Dr. Katharina Gerund’s chair. Before coming to the University of Zurich, I was a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary DFG research training group The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. I hold a joint Bachelor’s degree in English and American Studies and French Philology (FAU) as well as a Master’s degree in Interamerican Studies (FAU and Universitat de València, Spain). Currently, I am working on my PhD project titled Hip Hop Sentimentality.
Focusing on works by Black male rappers, my dissertation seeks to show that, contrary to popular belief, sentimentality is an integral part of US hip hop culture. Although sentimental elements were already present in early hip hop productions, I suggest that rap narratives have successively embraced sentimental tropes and aesthetics over the past three decades, a phenomenon I call the sentimental turn in hip hop culture. Moving its analytical focus from (self-)representations of the Black male individual to depictions of the African American nuclear family and, ultimately, hip hop communities of color, my PhD project sets out to trace the sentimental turn across selected hip hop productions, placing special emphasis on their lyrical and visual dimensions (including rap lyrics, music videos, cover art, and printed materials).

In March 2024, my chapter "My Palm and My Trigger Finger Itch, Bitch": Gangsterism and Female Hustling in Contemporary Hip Hop Culture was published in the edited volume Ladies in Arms: Women, Guns, and Feminisms in Contemporary Popular Culture (Transcript). In April of the same year, I presented at the 35th Biennial EAAS Conference in Munich, exploring representations of Afro-Dominican (American) experiences in contemporary hip hop culture. A chapter based on this presentation will be published in the edited volume The American Immigrant Narrative Revisited (Brill) in 2025. I also gave a talk at “American Soundscapes”, the 70th Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies in Oldenburg (23-25 May 2024), titled “So Many Tears: The Sentimental Self and Constructions of Black (Hyper-)Masculinity in Hip-Hop Culture”. In June 2024, I attended the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; my participation was funded by the Bavarian American Academy.

• "Hip Hop Culture” (SS 2023, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
• "The Harlem Renaissance” (FS 2025)
• "Textual Analysis" (HS 2025)
• "North American Literary Realism(s)" (HS 2025)

I am happy to supervise BA theses that match my research interests. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to write about a topic within the fields of hip hop studies, African American and Latinx culture/literature, gender studies and feminist theory, Interamerican studies, or the study of sentimentality, affect, and public feeling.