• Ecocriticism 
• Environmental Humanities 
• Speculative Fiction 
• Nonfiction 
• African-American Literature 
• Indigenous Literature 

I am one of the teaching and research assistants at the chair of Prof. Dr. Michael C. Frank, where I am pursuing my PhD in English and American Literature. Before starting my PhD, I completed my BA and MA studies at the English Department of the University of Zurich with a minor in Biology. My MA thesis, titled “The Changing Tropes of Power in African-American Speculative Fiction,” analyzed how characters in speculative fiction gain their power with particular focus on how African-American authors negotiate predominantly Western ideas of power.  

For my PhD thesis, I draw on my minor in biology and have turned towards ecocriticism. I analyze the representation of plants in contemporary English literature – reading nonfiction, historical fiction, and speculative fiction – that has been written since our awareness for the environmental crisis has reached its global platform. Our awareness for human-induced climate change and novel discoveries in botany have drawn more attention to the position of plants within nature and I seek to examine what our attention to plants says about the human-plant and human-nature relationship. Because plants are active, though frequently overlooked, participants in most aspects of human life, this topic creates many intersections between different fields of literary and environmental studies. 

• I am currently teaching the Textual Analysis module. 
• “Dystopian Climate Fiction: Reading the Climate Crisis Here, Now and Beyond” (FS 25) 

I am available as a supervisor for BA thesis. I’m particularly interested in topics that are related to Ecocriticism (such as Ecofeminism, Wilderness, Nature Writing, etc.) but also African-American and Indigenous Literature.