• Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century North American Literature and Culture
• Visual Cultures and Media (Photography, Film, TV, New Media)
• African American, Race, and Ethnic Studies
• Migration and Diaspora Studies
• Transnational American Studies
• Gender Studies and Intersectionality
• Inequality, Class, and Poverty Studies
• Architecture, Space, and Urban Studies
• Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities in the US and Canada
• Cultural Memory in the US and Europe

Employment

since October 2024: Professor of American Studies and the Media, TU Dortmund University

2021-2024: University Professor and Interim Chair of American Studies, University of Regensburg

2021-2024: Member of DFG Research Network “Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge”                   

2019: Guest Professorship, Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes/German Academic Scholarship Foundation, Summer Academy, Ljubljana, Slovenia

2018: Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA         

2015-2018: Member of DFG Research Network “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies”

2013-2021: Akademische Rätin/Assistant Professor of American Literary and Cultural Studies, KU Eichstaett-Ingolstadt

2012-2013: Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin/Assistant Professor of American Literature, Culture, Media, University of Siegen

2010-2012: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, German Excellence Initiative/International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University Giessen

2009-2010: Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, USA

Education

2021: Habilitation in American Literary and Cultural Studies, KU Eichstaett-Ingolstadt

2009: PhD in Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

2005: MA in Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

Monographs

• Transnational Imaginaries of Child Migration. In progress.
• Precarious Belongings: The Unmaking of the American Home, 1980s-Now. Book Manuscript. Forthcoming.
• Cultures of Emancipation: Photography, Race, and Modern American Literature. American Studies: A Monograph Series. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012.

Reviewed in: Astrid Böger. Kritikon Litterarum 42.3/4 (2015): 285-288.

Edited Volumes

• Blackness and the Knowledges of Intersectionality. Co-edited with Nathalie Aghoro. Review of International American Studies (RIAS) 18, Fall-Winter (2/2025). Special Issue. In preparation.
• Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place. Co-edited with Kerstin Schmidt. Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2019.

                        Reviewed in: Johanna Hartmann. Kritikon Litterarum 48.3/4 (2021): 424-429.

• David P. Boder. Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt. Co-edited with Alan Rosen and Werner Sollors. Second Revised Edition. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012.
• David P. Boder. Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt. Co-edited with Alan Rosen and Werner Sollors. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011.

                        Reviewed in: Amerikastudien/American Studies Forum; Einsicht: Bulletin des Fritz Bauer Instituts; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; tachles: Das Jüdische Wochenmagazin; taz; Trumah: Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• “Narratives of Neo-Passing: An Intersectional Approach to Reading Nella Larsen in the Twenty-First Century.” Blackness and the Knowledges of Intersectionality. Eds. Nathalie Aghoro and Julia Faisst. Review of International American Studies (RIAS) 18, Fall-Winter (2/2025). Special Issue. In preparation.
• With Nathalie Aghoro. “Introduction.” Blackness and the Knowledges of Intersectionality. Eds. Nathalie Aghoro and Julia Faisst. Review of International American Studies (RIAS) 18, Fall-Winter (2/2025). Special Issue. In preparation.
• “Working the Lines: On Lockouts and Layoffs in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat.” Unfree Spaces in the Modern World: Resistant Responses, Empowering Acts. Eds. Birgit Hebel-Bauridl and Sabine Koller. In preparation.
• “Borders in Architecture and Visual Art.” Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Art. Eds. Barry Sandywell and Martin Hand. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Submitted.
• “Weaponizing Nature and Possibilities for Solidarity: An Ecocritical Approach to Javier Zamora’s Border Crossing Poetry.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 68.4 (2023). Eds. Nathalie Aghoro, Katharina Gerund, and Sylvia Mayer. 473-489.
• “Unsilencing Voices: David P. Boder’s Transatlantic Holocaust Project, Multilingual Memory, and Intermedia Studies.” andererseits: Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies 9/10 (2021). 35-42.
• “Capturing Eviction in America: Forced Dislocation and the Iconography of the Housing Crisis.”Ambivalent Mobility in 21st-Century Literature and Culture. Special Issue of Literary Geographies 5.2 (2019). Eds. Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter. 168-184. <https://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/183>.
• “Wear Your Shelter: Climate Change Photography and Mary Mattingly’s Nomadographies.” Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place. Eds. Kerstin Schmidt and Julia Faisst. Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2019. 124-138.
• With Kerstin Schmidt. “Introduction: The Place of Photography.” Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place. Eds. Kerstin Schmidt and Julia Faisst. Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2019. 1-11.
• “Strolling the Biophilic City: Flâneurism, Urban Nature and Eco-Fiction.” Transforming Cities: Discourses of Urban Change. Eds. Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Nora Plesske, and Eckart Voigts. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. 43-57.

                        Reviewed in: Lucy Hamilton. European Journal of English Studies 22.3 (2018): 336-338.

• “Moving In and Out, Up and Down: Real Estate in Twenty-First Century Drama.” Inequality in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Eds. Barbara Hahn and Kerstin Schmidt. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 113-124.
• “Ghetto Aesthetics: Performing Spatial Inequality in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.” Approaching Transnational America in Performance. Eds. Birgit M. Bauridl and Pia Wiegmink. Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2017. 265-288.
• “The Spatial Turn in Literary and Cultural Studies: Space, Place and the Urban Imagination of Los Angeles.” Key Topics in English and American Studies II. Eds. Ansgar Nünning and Elisabeth Kovach. Trier: WVT, 2014. 55-76.
• “Sites of Slavery: Imperial Narratives, Plantation Architecture, and the Ideology of the Romance of the South.” Imagining Spaces/Places. Eds. Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Kirsi Saarikangas, and Renja Suominen-Kokkonen. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 185-197.
• “Rebuilding the Neighborhood: Race, Property, and Urban Renewal in Tremé.” American Lives. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013. 443-463.
• “Turning a Slave Into a Freeman: Frederick Douglass, Photography, and the Formation of African American Fiction.” Turning Points: Concepts and Narratives of Change in Literature and Other Media. Eds. Ansgar Nünning and Kai Sicks. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2012. 213-227.
• “Degrees of Exposure: Frederick Douglass, Daguerreotypes, and Representations of Freedom.” PhiN. Philologie im Netz. Beiheft/Supplement 5/2012: Audiences, Networks, Performances: Studies in U.S.-American Media History. Eds. Antje Kley and Peter Schneck. 71-100.
• “‘Delusionary Thinking, Whether White or Black or In Between?’ Fictions of Race in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain.” Philip Roth Studies, Special Issue: Roth and Race 2.2 (Fall 2006): 121-137.

Essays

• “Völkerrecht unter Beobachtung: Die Kunst der Widerrede und die Ästhetik des Dokumentarfilms.” Die Bleiwüste Feb. 26, 2019. <http://www.doccollection.de/blog/allgemein/volkerrecht-unter-beobachtung-die-kunst-der-widerrede-und-die-asthetik-des-dokumentarfilms>.

Reviews

• Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction. Miles Orvell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Review of International American Studies RIAS 16.1 (Spring-Summer 2023). Review. 319-326.
• American Literature and Immediacy: Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television. Heike Schaefer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. American Literary History (2022). Review.
• Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s. Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Kritikon Litterarum (2015). Review.
• Pornotopia: Architektur, Sexualität und Multimedia im Playboy. Beatriz Preciado. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2012. KULT_online 34 (2013). Review.
• Visuelle Kulturen der USA: Zur Geschichte von Malerei, Fotografie, Film, Fernsehen und Neuen Medien in Amerika. Ed. Christof Decker. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010. KULT_online 29 (2011). Review.
• The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo: Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation. Eds. Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010. KULT_online 28 (2011). Review.

Public Writing and Outreach

• “The American Home in Flames: Art vs. Motherhood in Little Fires Everywhere.” LadyFiction#9, Podcast with Stefanie Schaefer on The Trans-Atlanticist. Amerikazentrum Hamburg. November 2021.
• 40 newspaper articles on local politics, culture, and the arts, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, 2000.
• Various radio features on local culture, esp. literary arts, Radio Station M94.5, Munich, 1998-1999.

Invited Lectures and Presentations

• 7/2024 “The Color of Climate: Aesthetic Economies of Katrina Narratives,” Invited Lecture, “Model Imaginaries” Conference, Free University Berlin, Germany
• 9/2023 “Early Career Paths: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives,” Invited Panel Presentation and Discussion, International Online Symposium of the Association of Literary Urban Studies (ALUS)
• 5/2023 “Between Mobility and Deterrence: Multiscalar Narratives of Migration in Eco-Poetry,” Invited Keynote Lecture, “Narratives of Mobility in the Anthropocene: Time, Space, Society,” EU Horizon “Opportunities for a Fair Narrative of Migration” Workshop, Ghent, Belgium
• 1/2023 “Un/Freeing the Desert: Poetic Resistance Towards Immigration Justice,” Invited Lecture, “Unfree Spaces in the Modern World: Resistant Responses – Empowering Acts” Conference, Leibniz ScienceCampus “Europe and America in the Modern World,” Regensburg, Germany
• 7/2022 “Embodying Necropolitcs: Probing the Archive in Valeria Luiselli’s Work,” Invited Lecture, “Embodied Acts and American Photographs” Conference, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany (virtual)
• 6/2022 “Transnational U.S. Views on Populist Agendas and the War on Women,” Invited Roundtable Presentation and Discussion, “Transformation Back and Forth: Feminism, Gender and What Else?,” Leibniz ScienceCampus Regensburg “Europe and America in the Modern World”/Southeast European Studies, University of Regensburg, Germany
• 1/2022 “Transnational Imaginaries of Child Refugees,” Invited Lecture, Center for International and Transnational Area Studies (CITAS) Brownbag Session, University of Regensburg, Germany (virtual)
• 6/2021 “An Introduction to U.S. American Social Documentary Photography,” Invited Lecture, Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Lueneburg, Germany (virtual)
• 5/2021 “Macht in der Literatur: Amanda Gorman und die Öffentlichkeit der Lyrik,” Invited Lecture and Roundtable Discussion “Zwischen Sujet und Soft Power: Macht in der Kultur,” “Macht macht Gesellschaft: Annäherungen an ein soziales und politisches Phänomen” Conference, Max Weber-Programm Bayern/Akademie für Politische Bildung, Tutzing, Germany (virtual)
• 12/2020 “There’s No Place Like Home: Housing Insecurity in the American Imagination,” Invited Lecture, Amerika-Institut, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany (virtual)
• 6/2018 “Orders of Removal and Performative Interventions,” Invited Lecture, “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies” Conference, Mainz, Germany
• 3/2018 “Nowhere Matters: The Unmaking of the American Home,” Invited Lecture, Notre Dame University, IN, USA
• 3/2018 “Unsilencing Voices: David P. Boder’s Intermedia Holocaust Project, Multilingual Memory, and the Question of Affect,” Invited Lecture, Notre Dame University, IN, USA
• 10/2017 “‘Matter Out Of Place’: Homelessness and the Intermediality of Absence,” Invited Lecture, “‘Poverty Viewed At A Distance’? Depicting Destitution Across Media” Conference, Graz, Austria
• 7/2015 “Strolling the Bio-City,” Invited Lecture, “Transforming Cities” Conference, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany
• 9/2014 “Ghetto Aesthetics: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth and the Spatialization of Class,” Invited Lecture, Departments of English and African American Studies, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA
• 5/2013 “David P. Boder, Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt,” Book Presentation and Panel Discussion with Werner Sollors and Andreas Barth, Jewish Museum/Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
• 06/2012 “David P. Boder, Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt,” Book Presentation and Panel Discussion with Werner Sollors, Frank Kelleter, and Frank Mehring, German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Mainz, Germany
• 12/2011 “Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction: The Instability of Language and the Play of Meaning,” Invited Guest Lecture, “Literary Theory” Seminar, Department of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
• 10/2011 “David P. Boder, Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt,” Book Presentation and Panel Discussion, Bavarian American Academy, Munich, Germany
• 04/2010 “Uncovering the Dead: On the Aesthetics, Politics, and Ethics of Photography in Early Twentieth Century African American Literature,” Invited Lecture, Americanist Speaker Series, Duke University, NC, USA

Conference Papers

• 11/2023“Eco-Poetic Solidarities Across Borders,” American Studies Association (ASA), Montreal, Canada
• 10/2021 “U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and (Inter)Media Child Migration Narratives,” “Urban Im/mobilities and Borderland Narratives” FRINGE Urban Narratives/Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) Symposium (virtual)
• 10/2021 “Unhousing as Revolt: Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories and Jana Sophia Nolle’s Living Room,”   American Studies Association (ASA), San Juan, Puerto Rico (cancelled)
• 6/2021 “Breaking Ground: Vacant Homes and Participatory Culture in Contemporary Detroit,” German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Heidelberg, Germany (virtual)
• 11/2020 “Unhousing as Revolt: Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories and Jana Sophia Nolle’s Living Room,” American Studies Association (ASA), Baltimore, MD, USA (cancelled)
• 6/2020 “Breaking Ground: Vacant Homes and Participatory Culture in Contemporary Detroit,” German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Heidelberg, Germany (postponed to 2021)
• 5/2018 “Homelessness 2.0: New Documentary Modes of Precarious Habitats in Late Capitalism,” German Association for American Studies (DGfA), FU Berlin, Germany
• 9/2017 “Forced Dislocation and the Iconography of the Housing Crisis,” “Mobilizing Home(s)” Conference, Aarhus, Denmark
• 10/2016 “Evicted in America: Dispossession and Resistance in John Moore’s Evicted and Allison Lynn’s The Exiles,” American Studies Association (ASA), Denver, CO, USA
• 7/2015 “Moving In and Out, Moving Up and Down: Re-Evaluating Real Estate in Twenty-First Century Drama,” “Cultures of Inequality” Conference, Bavarian American Academy, Munich, Germany
• 11/2014“Framing Urban Inequality: Migration, Multilingualism, Multimedia Resistance,” “Keywords in American Literary Studies: A Conference for Werner Sollors,” Harvard University, USA
• 6/2014 “Wear Your Shelter: Natural Risks and Speculative Sustainability in Mary Mattingly’s Nomadographies,”German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Wuerzburg, Germany
• 6/2013 “Policies of Poverty, Aesthetics of Denial: Debunking ‘The Pruitt-Igoe Myth’ in Contemporary Documentary and Film,” “Screening Class” Conference, University of Freiburg, Germany
• 11/2012 “Touring Urban Empires: Documenting Latin American Disparity, Poverty Tourism, and Media Resistance in The City,” American Studies Association (ASA), San Juan, Puerto Rico
•  06/2012 “Rebuilding the Neighborhood: Race, Property, and Urban Renewal in Tremé,” German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Mainz, Germany
• 08/2011 “Sites of (Neo-)Slavery,” “Imagining Spaces/Places” Conference, Helsinki, Finland
• 06/2011 “Reconstruction in East Berlin: Black Transnationalism, Architecture, and Leitkultur in Paul Beatty’s Slumberland,” German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Regensburg
• 01/2011 “Democratizing Images: LIFE Pictures Douglass in 1968,” Modern Language Association (MLA), Los Angeles, CA
• 11/2010 “‘Teach Germans Disobedience:’ Gertrude Stein, Popular Media, and Post-Sovereignty,” Austrian Association of American Studies (AAAS), Innsbruck, Austria
• 07/2010 “Ralph Ellison, Photographer,” Nagoya American Studies Summer Seminar (NASSS), Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan
• 11/2009 “Shadow Archive: Lynching Photography, Afro-Modernist Literature, and Black Citizenship,” American Studies Association (ASA), Washington, D.C.
• 02/2009 “Changing Faces: The Visual Archive of Lynching and Modernist Literary Productions of African American Citizenship,” American Literature with a Focus on African American, Ethnic, and International Studies Colloquium, Harvard University
• 10/2008 “Show Business: The Labor of Photography and Henry James’s Changing Image,” American Studies Association (ASA), Albuquerque, NM
• 06/2008 “‘Yet Words Are Not The Thing:’ Photography and Showing Off in Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts,” The Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth University
• 05/2008 “On Becoming a Quasi-Photographer: Harold Frederic’s Marsena and Henry James’s New York Edition,” American Literature Association (ALA), San Francisco, CA
• 05/2007 “A Writer’s Camera Work: The Literary Portraits of Gertrude Stein,” American Literature Association (ALA), Boston, MA
• 04/2007 “Capturing Character: Photo-Narrative Portraits, Serialization, and Motion in Modern American Literature,” American Literature with a Focus on African American, Ethnic, and International Studies Colloquium, Harvard University
• 06/2006 “Degrees of Exposure: Frederick Douglass, Daguerreotypes, and Representations of Freedom,” German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Göttingen, Germany
• 10/2005 “‘Delusionary Thinking, Whether White or Black or In Between?’ Fictions of Race in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA), Houston, TX
• 10/2005 “Exile Doubly Exposed: Photography, Text, and Genre in Frederick Douglass and W. G. Sebald,” The New Comparativism Conference, Columbia University, NY
• 10/2004 “History Stares Back: Oblique Gazes and the Eye of the Object in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Southern Comparative Literature Association (SCLA), Columbia, SC
• 09/2004 “Embroidered Blackness: The Discourse of the Other in Claire Goll’s Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa,” “In Black and White” International Americanist-Germanist Colloquium Conference Harvard University
• 11/2004 “Ex-Post-Infancy in Walter Benjamin,” Midwest Modern Literature Association (MMLA), 07/2004 St. Louis, MO, and Culture and the Unconscious Conference, University of East London, London

Presentations at Cultural Institutions

• 2/2019 Melanie Liebheit and Gereon Wetzel (Dir.), The Art of Argument, Introduction to Documentary Film and Panel Discussion with the Directors, Filmstudio Eichstätt, Germany
• 12/2017 Zoe Rosenblum, “Colors in Motion,” Introduction to Art Exhibition, Catholic Academy of the Archdiocese of Freiburg, Germany
• 12/2014 Hubert P. Klotzeck, “Non-Places: The Stone Quarries Near Eichstätt,” Opening of Photography Exhibition and Discussion with the Artist, Galerie Bildfläche, Eichstätt, Germany