• Nineteenth-century literature and culture 

• Folklore and literature 

• Literary fairy tales  

• Modern genre fantasy 

• Material book history and the literary market 

I am currently a doctoral student and a teaching and research assistant for Prof. Dr. Barbara Straumann. Apart from an exchange semester at the University of Nottingham, I studied in Zurich, and I hold both a BA and an MA in English Literature and Linguistics as well as German Literature from the University of Zurich. My MA thesis argued that wonder, as a subject but especially as a perceptual attitude and mode of writing, characterises modern genre fantasy and offers a critical lens through which to understand the genre’s cultural relevance and appeal.  

My PhD project similarly focuses on literary ‘fantasy’ but traces the latter back to the nineteenth century. I explore Romantic and Victorian literary fairy tales and ‘fairy’ romances as well as contemporary theorisations of the fantastic in the arts. I am interested in the literary, cultural, and historical conditions and dynamics of generic innovation, and the network of theoretical discourses, actual practices and materialities in which forms are repurposed, adapted and expanded.  

I am happy to supervise BA theses that overlap with my own area of research, including the fantastic in the arts, literary fairy tales (inventions, revisions, and adaptations), modern genre fantasy, and the interrelationship of (magic) folk narrative and literature.