Curriculum vitae

I study US literature and culture of the long nineteenth century with a focus on settler colonialism, medicine, sentimentality, animals, and ecology.

After my MA degree in American Studies at Leipzig University, I pursued a PhD in English at the University at Albany, SUNY. I taught for over ten years at UAlbany before I became lecturer in literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. I joined the English Studies Department at TU Chemnitz in June 2024.

In my dissertation I look at the ways in which the new impersonal violence of modernity breeds an experience that Freud later calls ‘trauma,’ and how the birth of this new, traumatic subjectivity must be regarded through the lens of race, gender, and class.